Facebook, LinkedIn and your CRM
Facebook and LinkedIn decided to stop sharing data with many vendors, including many CRM vendors. An excerpt from an article in Small Business Trends:
“On April 30, Facebook will no longer allow third-party apps to export your data — including your Facebook contacts, profile photos and messages — into other applications.”
LinkedIn actually started doing it last July, before Facebook, so the same situation exists with that as well.
It first came to my attention yesterday when I saw it with Contactually and I’ve since determined that Top Producer and Wise Agent are affected as well. In other words unless I am misunderstanding the issue, none of the CRMs will have access to the data in Facebook and LinkedIn the way they used to. Point being don’t start running around trying to find a Real Estate CRM that pulls data from them because it will be a fruitless search. It’s not your CRM’s fault.
Contactually used to be able to gather new information like phone numbers and email addresses from Facebook and LinkedIn and no longer can. Top Producer used to display the Facebook status, and you could Like, Comment or View the Status right from within the contact record. No more. Wise Agent also interfaced with Facebook and LinkedIn but has removed them.
So the ability to interface and pull information from Facebook and LinkedIn was very handy but is probably gone for good. I saw a comment by someone who was angry with Contactually because she thought they mislead her about what it could do with regards to interaction with Facebook and LinkedIn. I responded to that post with essentially this: If you have to be angry with someone or something because you no longer have those capabilities, be angry with the Facebook and LinkedIn, not with the CRM vendor who is more upset about it than you are.
A potential upside is that from my conversations with the developers and CEO’s it sounds like the CRM vendors are working on a solution that will provide similar information. Whether they will find one remains to be seen, but it is in their best interest, because it is in your best interest. And they want to keep you happy.