December 11, 2012
By Kelly Liyakasa,

Nimble Integrates with HootSuite Social Profiles

Nimble today released the Nimble app for social media management dashboard HootSuite, allowing users to connect a contact's social profile on the platform to the rest of their Nimble contact record.

Using Nimble's Social Relationship Manager, a business user has a full composite of his interactions with customers and prospects—from emails and LinkedIn correspondence to direct messages on Twitter and check-ins on Foursquare. Now, with this latest integration, Nimble's founder and CEO Jon Ferrara says Nimble has become the first CRM system to take advantage of HootSuite's profile options.

"You now have the ability to see the Nimble record from within the HootSuite environment," Ferrara comments. As a user, "I can see when I last contacted [a person], what our connections are, and I can go ahead and bring up that record within Nimble and see the full context and history" of that relationship or interaction, as well as schedule follow-up tasks for myself or other users.

If a HootSuite user is not already a contact in the Nimble CRM system, that person's profile information may be imported, which then allows a salesperson, for instance, to match additional profiles on social networks like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Contacts to the person and view related connections or keep tabs on when he or she last interacted with a contact.

The Nimble-HootSuite hook-up will afford HootSuite users increased access to dashboard use cases beyond the standard community management and marketing roles, both early adopters. "Sales, service, and support teams will benefit greatly by utilizing social media to enable customer engagement and social selling," said Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, in a statement. "Through the Nimble app, business teams can now follow up with social media leads… [and] nurture relationships in real time."

Down the line, Ferrara says there are plans for Nimble to integrate with other popular business and social platforms, such as DropBox, Google Drive, Evernote, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and SlideShare. The ultimate goal, he says, is to give salespeople or other enterprise users access to contacts' full history—from their email correspondences to photos they share on Pinterest or their slidedeck from a presentation.

For a sales rep who wants to engage and nurture leads, the social element is critical, Ferrara says. "I'm not on Pinterest posting infographics on sales," he remarks. "I'm posting things that inspire me. You can see what I'm all about."