Salesforce introduced it’s newest product last week–Social.com. The new software is meant to simplify a company’s social media efforts, automating the way a company finds, analyzes and socially advertises to potential customers on the social frontier. Similar to Hubspot 3, the new Social.com is meant to solidify the ROI of social media, as companies will be able to see exactly which leads are coming in from which service. After its acquisition of Buddy Media last year, this expansion into social media advertising seems a natural progression for SFDC.
Let’s look at some of the features:
The main function of the product is to create, optimize, and automate social media advertising campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. These efforts are bolstered by the inclusion of data from your Salesforce CRM records, allowing you to target users based on their CRM contact information. So, for example, you could create a Facebook ad campaign that includes an on-site contest, then create ads that target any contest participants. The list of participants is updated in real time, and Social.com will even help you word your ads!
In the future, one can imagine that the software will be expanded to use other social media sites, as advertisements become available on them. CEO Mark Benioff discussed the future of Salesforce at the Social.com release–He described seven major upcoming trends: social media; mobile devices; large amounts of data analysis; self-organizing communities at work and in society; software apps from industrial organizations as well as consumer companies; cloud computing; and what he called “the human factor, how we are connecting and how we build trust.” With such a large step in the social direction, it seems that Salesforce is fully embracing the future.
