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Managing Social Media CRM (Nimble Review)

The impact that social media management has on business CRM processes has always been a big question amongst my peers. I have personally found that my Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin Mail inbox’s are as lucrative communication vehicles as my email inbox. Most of my new business deals have been secured through my blog or social media channels. On top of this my clients have continued to be interested in contacting me through social media channels rather than on email or telephone.

The challenge for me here has been not missing any communication from clients. I am pretty good at getting back to everyone who contacts me, however I don’t check my Facebook account every 10mins for a new message (contrary to popular belief).

Now I could put my Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts on “push notifications’ to my iPhone but I have found this to be a rather ineffective way to live from a productivity point of view. I find that this made my communication methods stressful, and time consuming (more than they needed to be).

The end result is a need for tools to help us manage our Social Media CRM.

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Welcome to Nimble!

Nimble has come the closest to managing social media and email communication in one dashboard view. It also helps manage your contacts and consolidate their social profiles. Another nice touch is being able to link your google calendar to the account.

I found Nimble to be very useful by bringing together my four main communication tools under one interface (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Email)

As the program is still in BETA I am expecting to see improvements and tweaks in the near future that will make the tool more useful to the general user. At the moment it seems to have a very specific use to a specific individual. I will go through a few of the uses and point out a few limitations that I have seen so far.

What can link to the Nimble profile?

Nimble will be useful to individuals managing their own communication through their personal Facebook Profile, a single twitter profile, a single Linkedin profile and multiple Gmail and IMAP accounts.

The biggest limitation I can see right now is that you can’t link you Facebook business pages and multiple Twitter accounts. The Facebook pages element would improve Nimble because not everyone uses their personal profile to communicate on a business level but rather they may use a business page to do business communication through status updates and comment replies.

Status Updates

The great news here is that you can update your status to multiple accounts at once. Although this is a standard feature on most social media management systems it is good to see this in the CRM systems.

How does this help me manage my contacts better?

Simple! It runs searches in Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin for your contact and tries to link their social profiles to the contact. In other words, when you load a new contact, Nible searches the internet for the contacts social profiles. You can easily attached those social profiles to their contact card, request a friendship, follow them and send them messages.

In running a few tests on this I found it to be a little problematic as it seems to search for the persons name rather than email address. This often lead me to an incorrect result which is not a huge problem but it can create incorrect contact cards if a user is blindly using the application.

Reputation Tracking

This is a brilliant feature. Twitter users know that you can search twitter for you name or company name and find people who are tweeting about you. When you add your twitter profile to Nimble, it imports your search lists. Now you can search these lists inside Nimble. Even better Nimble will search Facebook of mentions as well.

Please bear in mind that when searching Facebook you will only be searching the public profiles and not any profiles where Facebook users have set their privacy setting to private profiles.

Managing your calendar

As i said before you can link your Google Calendar the Nimble. This means that you can manage your diary easily inside Nimble.

One Great Interface

Nimble brings it all together. Giving you one place to manage almost all of your communication and scheduling needs. It separates your CRM areas into four simple categories – Contacts, Messages, Activities and Social. Keeping a simple approach to an otherwise complex and time consuming process.

It does need some work to make it more useful to businesses and people who manage more accounts inside Facebook and Twitter but it is a great step in the right direction.

Well Done to the team at Nimble!

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