If the Social Networks Won’t Come to Nimble, Nimble Will Go to Them

I had a chat with a gentleman recently who wanted to use Nimble CRM to monitor a contact’s social activity. There was a time when we could do that, but only to a limited extent, on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We can still do that, in some fashion, on Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn would be another story.

Time flies but I guess that it was about 5 years ago that Facebook and LinkedIn both decided to cut off third-party access to their platforms. This included Nimble. Not long after, at least LinkedIn (I’m not sure about Facebook) decided to allow limited access to their platform to a few enterprise level CRMs providing that you have a premium version of LinkedIn. I believe that would be Sales Navigator.

Nimble is $19 per user per month when paid annually. An enterprise level CRM with Sales Navigator could be $100’s of dollars per user per month and, even then, I’m not so sure that you could actually monitor a contact’s social activity from within your CRM, if you could even afford to do so.

Let’s flip the scenario. If the social networks won’t come to my CRM, can my CRM go to them? With Nimble, the answer would be “Yes” and we can do that using Nimble’s Prospector browser extension which is included with every Nimble account.

Prospector will allow you to view, create, or edit any Nimble contact record and can do so from any web page including your social networks. This includes from an individual’s social profile page to your network’s news feed. Your Nimble contact record can include a direct link to that person’s social profiles or, at least with LinkedIn, I could use that link to go directly to that person’s activity listing.

Here are some non-Nimble tips regarding the social networks that can be incredibly beneficial if you wish to monitor the activity of a select group of people. Both Twitter and Facebook will allow you to create lists as a way of organizing your connections. These lists will filter your news feeds and will only show activity from those select few.

Nimble does have a feature called Signals which will allow you to manage these lists from within Nimble. LinkedIn, unfortunately, is a little more challenging. At one time, and this was for a short period of time, LinkedIn would allow you to tag your connections and then to filter your news feed. That capability (I’m not sure) may still be available in Sales Navigator.

In order to filter your news feed on LinkedIn, you have two options …

  1. Disconnect from those who you do not wish to monitor. This is a pretty drastic step, however, let’s be honest. You don’t probably know, let alone care about, over 50% of your connections anyway:) Quality vs. quantity.
  2. Option #2 will allow you to maintain your connections. Instead of losing them, you mute them. Muting will remove their activity from your news feed.

Below is a video for your watching and listening enjoyment that will give you an over on Prospector. If you have any questions about whether or not Nimble would be right for you, please feel free to schedule a free 30-minute Zoom consultation with me!

Craig M. Jamieson
Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!
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