Social media isn’t only a marketing channel anymore. It’s a data platform that ties sales, service, and marketing together through in-depth customer interactions. What does this mean for marketers? It means a brand’s social media presence needs to be driven by more than engaging, high-performing content.

Today, 80% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as the products or services they offer. Your social strategy needs to be founded on a deep understanding of who your customers really are, what they’re saying, and how they interact with your brand. Only then can you successfully take your social signals beyond marketing and into sales and service.

Connection is the key to success

One of the best ways to completely understand who your customers are is through connecting social personas. Imagine if you knew that the customer who contacted you on Facebook today was actually the same person who called yesterday about a sales inquiry. With the right social data platform, it’s possible to convert otherwise unknown social accounts into known customers — and many trailblazing Salesforce customers are doing just that.

With the new Salesforce Contact Connector in Social Studio, marketers can connect social accounts to Salesforce customer records. The ability to make this connection is the holy grail for social marketers. It allows them to see each customer’s contact details and recent service interactions directly in Social Studio, which then helps them to truly understand the people behind the social handles so that you can deliver incredible customer experiences to them.

Here are some of the best ways to connect social personas:

1. Add social sign-on to your website

When you give customers the ability to sign in to your website with their Facebook or Twitter account, you have the capability to link their social accounts to their customer records. Many customers enjoy opting into this feature since it’s convenient and doesn’t require a new login with yet another email and password combination to remember. Whenever they’re logged into their social accounts (which, if they’re anything like me, is all the time) they can seamlessly log into your website as well.

2. Incentivize social account linking

If you have existing customers who haven’t linked their social accounts to their accounts on your website, you can run promotions or offer benefits and discounts to help inspire them to do so. When you offer compelling rewards to your customers, they are more likely to provide you with this info.

3. Find new opportunities for social account linking

Consider all of the moments when customers interact with your organization. Do they attend events? Redeem in-store offers? Sign up for loyalty programs? Respond to promotions? These moments and others are all excellent opportunities for you to link customers’ social accounts to their customer records. When you provide the chance for customers to share their social accounts with you at these times, they’ll feel heard, understood, and valued by your brand.

4. Leverage one-on-one social media interactions

More now than ever before, customers contact companies through social media with sales and service queries. These interactions are valuable touchpoints for brands to link social personas to customer accounts. When interacting with a customer through social media and accessing their customer account to resolve an issue or complaint, service team members should know to link the two accounts together to ensure optimal service quality well into the future.

Takeaway: Linked accounts benefit customers

Think about this from your customers’ perspective. Some customers prefer to use phone calls for one kind of brand interaction, and Twitter for other kinds of brand interactions. However, if a customer receives a different experience on Twitter than they do on a phone call, it can be very frustrating. When you link social personas to customer accounts, it eliminates these hiccups. Empower your teams to deliver consistently positive customer experiences across every communication channel, wherever your customers prefer.

To learn more about connecting social personas to customer accounts, explore Social Studio.