Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

Are your customers raving about you on social media or are they complaining? If you don't know where your customers hangout on social media, you can't possibly know what they are saying. Plenty of solutions allow you to track keywords like your business and product names, but making the link between an existing customer and social accounts can be tricky, particularly if you have hundreds or thousands of customers.

In many cases, this becomes a reactive process where your company attempts to figure out if the complaint is coming from a customer after the complaint happened by seeing if anything about the social account maps back to a known representative from an existing account relationship. A better approach would be to create a dossier of customer social accounts, which would allow for better relationships before a problem arises.

How can you build out a collection of social profiles? One way is to throw people at the problem and have your customer service team attempt to look up all your customers one at a time. This simply doesn't scale.

A better solution would be to use the data you have about your customers, like email addresses and names, to find your customers with a programmatic solution. Using the public API from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social network you consider important is one way to accomplish this, or you could use an API that aggregates all the social data the way Clearbit does.

Send the Clearbit API a customer email address and the company does the heavy lifting to return all the data from a variety of social networks. Once you get the data, you can store it in your CRM and use it to inform the tools you use for monitoring social networks and engaging with customers.

Clearbit also provides additional API calls for looking up data about companies, verifying addresses, and OFAC compliance screening. While you certainly can build out custom code to do each of these functions in house, something like Clearbit can save you time with a reusable solution that gets you up and running faster than coding it yourself might.

You can try out Clearbit with 50 free API calls per month, with pricing starting at $99 monthly for the full service.