I saw a post written by Steve Olenski in Social Media Today that was intriguing. It’s 2012, Do You Know Your Customer’s Social Media Handle?
In the article he quoted from a survey conducted by Axiom and Loyalty360 that provided some very interesting stats on data collection in marketing.
- 2% of respondents do not even capture name, address and email
- 14% do not track nor plan to track transaction data
- 40% have no plans to track basic demographic data such as household size and income
- 11% do not collect mobile phone numbers
- 36% do not collect customer feedback/survey data
- Over 60% do not collect nor plan to collect their customers’ social media handles
Amazing when knowledge is so important to understanding and nurturing your relationship with a customer or prospect
Untapped prospect intelligence from their social media handle
I’ll leave some of the customer satisfaction data points for you to wonder about. The one that really jumped out to me was the 60% who have no intention to start collecting social media handles.
Think about what a goldmine they’re missing out on. When building a profile or data record of clients & prospects, address, phone number and email address are always high on the list. What about their Social Media handle?
This could provide a wealth of information that is mostly going untapped. Do they have a LinkedIn profile or are they on Twitter? It’s relatively easy to check, and the information you can gather by just looking is huge. These profiles will give you background and help understand interest and in some cases need.
Bottom-line if you’re not doing, get started. A number of CRM tools have build in mechanisms to capture this information. We use Highrise and it can automatically search for the contact LinkedIn record. We also make sure that our landing pages have a Twitter entry option. Not everyone enters the data, but it’s another great way to connect, and understand their interests and needs.
