Social media customer service software
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A guide to the 11 best social media customer service software
更新日: May 5, 2025
Social media is a pivotal platform for businesses to engage with customers (and maybe even their customers' friends). As consumers increasingly turn to social channels to voice concerns, seek assistance, or share feedback, businesses use robust social media customer service software to improve their performance.
Robust, in this case, means streamlining and centralizing interactions and enhancing responsiveness, so you can effectively meet and exceed customer expectations in real time. However, with so many software providers vying for your business, you must meticulously vet potential options.
The right customer service tool can help you make the choice that will propel your business to new heights in customer satisfaction and loyalty. We’ll help you avoid a hasty decision that can lead to missed opportunities, inefficiencies, and even reputational damage. Let’s get started.
More in this guide:
- What is social media customer service software?
- The 11 best social media software
- Features of social media customer service platforms
- Benefits of social media customer service tools
- Managing the team responsible for social media customer service
- Choosing the best social media channels for customer service
- 5 essential tips for your social media customer service team
- Social media customer service best practices
- Frequently asked questions
- Try social media customer service tools for free
What is social media customer service software?
Social media customer service software is a specialized tool that helps businesses manage, respond to, and track customer interactions across social media platforms.
This software streamlines the process of addressing customer communication by centralizing messages and brand mentions from platforms like Messenger, X (previously known as Twitter), and WhatsApp Business.
Beyond mere management, social media customer service tools often come equipped with features like automation, analytics, and integration capabilities. These features enable businesses to offer timely, consistent, and data-driven support, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience in the digital realm.
Additionally, these tools help businesses engage with customers in real time, track brand mentions across platforms, and actively listen to social conversations, providing valuable insights for proactive support. Since these interactions are public, they also significantly shape the brand’s image, allowing companies to showcase their commitment to customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships with their audience.
The 11 best social media software
Dive into our comprehensive roundup of leading social media customer service software providers to discover the perfect fit for your brand's needs and goals.
- Zendesk: Best for all-in-one, AI-driven social media CX
- Freshdesk: Best for scaling customer support teams
- Hootsuite: Best for streamlining social media management
- Zoho Desk: Best for integrating business support ecosystems
- Front: Best for collaborative team communication
- Sprout Social: Best for advanced social media insights
- Sprinklr Social: Best for enterprise-level social intelligence
- Hiver: Best for Gmail team collaboration
- LiveAgent: Best for omnichannel customer support workflows
- Gladly: Best for tracking customer interactions
- Agorapulse: Best for small social media teams
1. Zendesk
Best for all-in-one, AI-driven social media CX
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$19 per agent/month (billed annually) |
14 days |
|
Zendesk is a globally recognized customer service software that can connect your business with customers on social media. Zendesk AI improves customer and employee experiences, providing instant responses and streamlining workflows. Our bots can proactively guide customers through troubleshooting, offer product recommendations, and, when necessary, escalate issues to human agents.
The omnichannel Agent Workspace integrates with social media platforms, collecting all customer interactions across channels in one place, allowing agents to have a complete view of each customer's conversational history with your business. Additionally, Zendesk integrates with other customer service and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to form an interconnected system. This enhances agent efficiency, removes data silos, and creates a personalized customer experience (CX) across all touchpoints.
Recognizing that customers interact with brands on various channels, Zendesk ensures that whether it's a public post, an email, or a chat message, everything funnels into the same ticketing system, facilitating a consistent response strategy. This omnichannel approach makes it so businesses can meet customers where they are and on the channel of their choice, providing them with the best experience across channels.
Complementing this is the analytics suite, which gives businesses deep insights into metrics like response times, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, and agent performance. These data-driven insights empower you to continuously refine your strategies, ensuring your agents are agile and responsive in this evolving landscape.
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Pros |
Cons |
|
|
User reviews:
- “Our sales and customer relationships have been strengthened by Zendesk.”
- “Great tool for meeting your customers where they are.”
- “We doubled our efficiency immediately!”
2. Freshdesk
Best for scaling customer support teams
|
Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$15 per agent/month (billed annually) |
14 days |
|
Freshdesk is customer support software that can help businesses deliver service over social media. Its centralized workspace aggregates customer interactions from various social media platforms into a unified dashboard where agents can customize ticketing workflows at scale. Automated ticket assignments route customer conversations to the most suitable agent.
Freshdesk also offers analytics to give businesses insights into their social media performance. However, it’s been noted that reports are limited and require a large amount of manual manipulation to get actionable data.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
User reviews:
- “Efficient and seamless customer support.”
- “Okay, on a small scale.”
- “Formatting options need work.”
Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Freshdesk compare.
3. Hootsuite
Best for streamlining social media management
|
Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$99/month for one user (billed annually) |
30 days |
|
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that provides businesses with customer service tools. Its centralized workspace lets businesses manage different social channels in one dashboard. Hootsuite also has integrations with various tools so that businesses can connect their CRM systems, marketing tools, and other essential software.
The platform has automation features, allowing businesses to schedule posts, set up automated responses for common queries, and auto-assign messages to specific team members. Businesses can gather performance metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their customer service strategies.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
User reviews:
- “Hootsuite makes it easy to schedule content in advance.”
- “Easy to use, but the graphics are childish and distracting.”
- “The analytics that are provided to me always seem inaccurate.”
Learn more: Discover how Hootsuite integrates with Zendesk.
4. Zoho Desk
Best for integrating business support ecosystems
|
Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
Free |
15 days |
|
Zoho Desk offers businesses a suite of tools for social media customer service. Its reports provide businesses with insights into their social media interactions, highlighting metrics like CSAT scores and average response times. Automatic ticket assignments, pre-defined response templates, and workflow automations help businesses improve their support processes.
In addition to its reporting capabilities, Zoho Desk can integrate with social media platforms. It can centralize communication from Facebook, X, and Instagram so all queries get addressed regardless of the customer's chosen channel.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
User reviews:
- “Reliable and efficient customer support solution.”
- “The initial setup can feel a bit overwhelming.”
- “Poor customer service and difficult to navigate.”
Learn more: Discover how Zoho integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.
5. Front
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$19 per seat/month (billed annually) |
14 days |
|
Front, a customer operations platform, assists businesses that want to provide customer service on social media. It gives businesses detailed analytics that shed light on various facets of their customer interactions, from response times and resolution rates to team performance metrics.
Beyond reporting, Front offers a collaborative omnichannel inbox that integrates with multiple communication channels. It also has automation tools to help take care of routine tasks, suggest responses, and prioritize messages based on urgency or context.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
User reviews:
- “Great functionality. I love the appearance.”
- “Has potential but needs upgrades, which customer support always delays.”
- “The search for emails is very complex.”
Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Front compare.
6. Sprout Social
Best for advanced social media insights
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$199 per seat/month (billed annually) |
30 days |
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Sprout Social is a social media management platform that helps businesses navigate the intricate landscape of social media. Its analytics provide businesses with advanced insights, giving an overview of social media interactions with metrics such as engagement rates, response times, and customer sentiment (how customers think and feel about a brand). The software’s automation features allow teams to set up workflows and route queries to specific agents.
Aside from the reporting capabilities, Sprout Social also has a centralized workspace that groups customer interactions into a unified dashboard. Agents can monitor, engage with, and respond to customer inquiries, feedback, or mentions across various platforms, without switching between multiple interfaces.
|
Pros |
Cons |
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User reviews:
- “A must-have for social media management.”
- “It would be great if the analytics were more comprehensive.”
- “Expensive and glitchy.”
Learn more: Discover how Sprout Social integrates with Zendesk.
7. Sprinklr Social
Best for enterprise-level social intelligence
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
Contact Sprinklr |
Contact Sprinklr |
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Sprinklr Social is a social media management software that gives businesses a toolkit to provide customer service across channels. Its enterprise-level analytics delve deep into a brand’s social media interactions, providing insights into engagement levels, response efficiency, and overall customer sentiment.
The platform’s omnichannel support capabilities allow integration with social media platforms so customers can reach out via X, Facebook, or Instagram. These interactions are channeled into a centralized system, facilitating a consistent response strategy. Features like automated ticket assignments and predefined templates assist with reply times.
|
Pros |
Cons |
User reviews:
- “Sophisticated platform that can do amazing things once you learn it.”
- “It can get a bit overwhelming trying to learn how to use it for your business.”
- “Sprinklr Social is an extremely bulky platform for a moderator.”
Learn more: Discover how Sprinklr integrates with Zendesk.
8. Hiver
Best for Gmail team collaboration
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
Free |
7 days |
|
Hiver is primarily known as an email collaboration tool, but it has extended its capabilities to aid businesses in delivering social media customer service. The platform allows businesses to set up automated workflows, such as routing specific queries to designated team members based on predefined criteria or triggering auto-responses for common queries.
Hiver offers a centralized workspace within Gmail that streamlines the management of customer interactions. By integrating with various social media platforms, Hiver collects customer inquiries and feedback into a unified dashboard so agents can monitor, prioritize, and address customer concerns without switching between multiple platforms.
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Pros |
Cons |
|
|
User reviews:
- “Hiver is the best way to manage shared Gmail inboxes.”
- “A little hard to set up, but once it’s going, it’s good.”
- “It makes finding emails very difficult.”
9. LiveAgent
Best for omnichannel customer support workflows
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
$15 per agent/month (billed annually) |
30 days |
|
LiveAgent offers a social media customer service platform as one piece of its customer support software. LiveAgent gives agents a centralized omnichannel workspace that integrates with social media platforms. It consolidates customer inquiries, feedback, and brand mentions so agents can respond to customers.
The platform also facilitates the creation of automated workflows, such as routing specific queries to the appropriate team members or triggering auto-responses for frequently asked questions. Among the core strengths of the LiveAgent software is its reporting capabilities. LiveAgent's analytics offer a good view into a company’s social media interactions.
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Pros |
Cons |
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User reviews:
- “Enabled us to have more effective response tools to achieve customer satisfaction.”
- “I like that you can connect so much together, but the phone system setup was really disappointing.”
- “The support tickets do not allow you to internally link to a knowledge base article.”
Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. LiveAgent compare.
10. Gladly
Best for tracking customer interactions
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Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
Contact Gladly |
Contact Gladly |
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Gladly is a customer service platform that provides social media customer service software. It has AI-driven bots that can handle routine inquiries, guiding customers through common issues and providing instant responses. Moreover, these bots can escalate complex queries to human agents.
Gladly also offers a centralized workspace for businesses to provide cohesive customer support. By integrating with social media platforms, Gladly tracks customer interactions and records them in a single interface. The platform facilitates the creation of automated workflows, such as intelligently routing specific queries based on their nature or urgency or triggering follow-up actions post-conversation.
|
Pros |
Cons |
User reviews:
- “Gladly allows us to reach out to customers in a more personal manner.”
- “Streamlined, but confusing.”
- “Does not align well with dealer service needs.”
Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Gladly compare.
11. Agorapulse
Best for small social media teams
|
Starting price |
Free trial |
Key features |
|
Free |
30 days |
|
Agorapulse is a social media management platform designed to help businesses and marketing professionals with social media engagement, content scheduling, and reporting. It has a free tier for smaller or budget-conscious social media teams. The software supports multiple social media channels, enabling users to manage their online presence from a single dashboard.
The platform offers features including content scheduling across various social networks, inbox management for comments and messages, detailed analytics and reporting tools, and team collaboration capabilities. Agorapulse provides automated publishing, real-time engagement tracking, competitive analysis, and customizable reports that help organizations measure their social media performance and evaluate their digital marketing strategies.
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Pros |
Cons |
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H4: User reviews:
- “A must-have social tool for agencies.”
- “A good basic scheduling platform, but not the easiest to use and could have more features.”
- “It crashes regularly, and the solutions provided by the customer support team are not feasible.”
Features of social media customer service platforms
The right features can significantly elevate your brand's responsiveness, efficiency, and reputation. Ensure you remain competitive and resonate effectively with your audience by partnering with a social media customer service platform that provides the following performance tools.
- AI and automation: These tools help to improve social media customer service operations in several ways. This includes automating repetitive tasks, providing personalized service, identifying trends, and improving customer satisfaction.
- Omnichannel support:Social media customer service software helps businesses provide omnichannel customer support online by allowing them to respond to inquiries across channels from a single interface. They can also track customer interactions and collect customer feedback from all communication channels.
- Analytics and reporting: Businesses can use the analytics and reporting features of social media customer service software to gain insights into customer behavior, performance, and satisfaction.
- Centralized workspace: This software provides a centralized workspace, which can boost operations by allowing businesses to manage all customer service interactions in one location. This can help businesses boost efficiency, collaboration, visibility, and reporting to improve CX overall.
- Apps and integrations: Social media customer service software should offer pre-built apps and integrations that seamlessly connect with your existing systems, as this ensures a fast deployment time. By integrating with tools like CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, or marketing automation software, customer service teams can access comprehensive customer profiles, purchase histories, and previous interactions.
These features help to keep teams connected, transfer data between systems, reduce manual entry errors, save time, and elevate social media customer service across all channels.
Benefits of social media customer service tools
Social media customer support software centralizes and streamlines customer interactions across your various platforms and offers enhanced responsiveness. The right software drives operational excellence and elevates CX through the following benefits.
Better customer relationships
By providing timely, consistent, and personalized responses across social platforms, you demonstrate your commitment to the customer. Social media customer service software's ability to centralize interactions ensures that teams address every query or piece of feedback. As a result, customers feel heard and valued.
Additionally, integrated analytics tools offer insights into customer preferences and behaviors, enabling businesses to tailor their interactions and services to meet individual needs. Over time, this proactive and attentive approach cultivates trust and loyalty, transforming casual social media followers into long-term brand advocates.
Faster agent response times
Social media customer service tools are engineered to optimize agent workflows, leading to significantly faster response times. By centralizing interactions from social platforms into a single interface, agents can quickly identify, prioritize, and address incoming queries without switching between multiple platforms.
Automated features—such as ticket categorization, tagging, and routing—ensure inquiries go to the most appropriate agent or department immediately. Additionally, AI-driven tools can provide agents with instant access to relevant information or suggest potential responses, reducing time spent on research or crafting replies.
Increased sales on social channels
Social media customer service software can be a potent catalyst for driving sales on social channels. By ensuring prompt and personalized responses to customer inquiries, businesses can foster trust and credibility so users are more inclined to purchase. The centralized dashboard lets agents quickly identify potential leads, upsell opportunities, or cross-sell scenarios.
Moreover, the software's analytics tools can provide insights into customer preferences and behaviors, enabling businesses to tailor their marketing and promotional efforts more effectively. By addressing queries, resolving issues, and offering product recommendations in real time, businesses can provide good customer service and convert casual interactions into tangible sales opportunities.
More balanced workloads
By centralizing social media requests and issues into a unified system, you can ensure balanced ticket distribution among agents. So, instead of having agents individually scour various platforms for customer inquiries, the software aggregates all interactions into a single dashboard.
Advanced algorithms, like those you receive from Zendesk, then assess the nature and urgency of each request and route tickets based on agent skill, current workload, and historical performance. This automated ticket assignment ensures that no single agent is overwhelmed while others remain idle.
Improved visibility of customer interactions
Social media customer service software acts as a safeguard for your business, making sure that customer interactions across social channels are tracked and addressed. Businesses can see all ongoing, pending, and resolved inquiries by centralizing these interactions into a single dashboard. This heightened visibility means no request, comment, or feedback is overlooked or forgotten.
Managing the team responsible for social media customer service
Effective social media customer service requires a cross-functional team that can deliver exceptional customer experiences. Building this team requires a holistic approach that combines technical proficiency, emotional intelligence, and brand understanding. This involves comprehensive training in customer service skills and tools for social media monitoring, crisis management, and real-time response.
Critical elements include:
- Developing clear communication protocols for a collaborative environment across departments
- Leveraging technology like AI and automation to optimize workflows
- Engaging in real-time responses for faster resolution and more complete data
- Establishing performance metrics that go beyond traditional customer service KPIs
- Utilizing analytics for continuous improvement
- Fostering a culture of continuous learning that can quickly adapt to evolving digital communication landscapes.
Ultimately, the goal is to enhance customer satisfaction by providing seamless and efficient service through all the social media platforms your customers use.
Choosing the best social media channels for customer service
Selecting the right social media platforms is crucial for targeted and effective customer service strategies. Your channel choice should align closely with your audience's preferences and the nature of your customer interactions.
Different social media platforms offer unique advantages for customer service, making it essential to understand each channel's strengths and audience demographics. X, for instance, gives businesses access to real-time customer support, with its fast-paced environment and public-facing interactions enabling quick problem resolution. Facebook provides a more comprehensive platform with robust messaging features that allow for more in-depth conversations.
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Platform |
Key CX strength |
Best for |
|
X |
Real-time responses |
Quick support |
|
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Detailed messaging |
Long-form communication |
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Visual communication |
Product-related queries |
|
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Professional communication |
B2B services |
|
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Private, instant messaging |
Global communication |
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TikTok |
Trending, creative communication |
Brand personality |
The most successful customer service strategies often involve an omnichannel experience, recognizing that customers have diverse communication preferences. Choosing between platforms means considering criteria like:
- Audience demographics
- Response time capabilities
- Message complexity
- Brand alignment
- Resource availability
- Integration capabilities
- Cost-effectiveness
These criteria can help businesses ensure their solution creates a strategic, responsive, and people-first social media support approach that meets diverse customer needs and preferences.
5 essential tips for your social media customer service team
Building a high-performing social media customer service team demands more than just technical skills. Strategic training, advanced tools, and a proactive approach are key to creating memorable customer experiences.
- Become an expert on your brand voice and values: Create detailed style guides that outline your brand’s customer service voice and tone, language, and emotional nuance. You can give AI-powered knowledge base software just a few bullet points to build internal articles for your team to guide them on these brand elements.
- Leverage AI-driven social media monitoring tools: Integrate AI-powered tools to help categorize and prioritize incoming messages. These tools can help you create custom dashboards that give real-time insights into customer interactions and behavior. And according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025, customers see clear differences emerging between companies that utilize AI effectively and ones that don’t.
- Design a rapid response strategy: Create pre-approved response templates for common customer inquiries, and make sure your people know escalation protocols for sensitive issues. AI agent copilots can help remind agents of information like this as well as give suggested responses to customers.
- Adopt a proactive customer engagement approach: Regularly monitor brand mentions beyond direct customer service interactions. Use AI to analyze mentions and interactions and identify patterns and trends.
- Commit to continuous learning and adaptation: Establish a regular training schedule that keeps the team updated on crucial information, such as a social media platform’s features and evolving customer expectations. Quality assurance (QA) can help you ensure your team can continuously learn and improve by offering managers insight into knowledge gaps and new coaching opportunities.
These tips can help your team streamline customer service on all social media channels.
Social media customer service best practices
Social media customer service is no longer optional—it's critical to brand reputation and customer loyalty. Businesses must balance technological efficiency with a genuine, personalized human connection. Follow these best practices for the most effective, efficient, and personalized customer service, no matter the social media platform.
- Respond quickly: Prompt responses show commitment to customer care, while personalized interactions enhance loyalty.
- Respond consistently: Maintaining a consistent brand voice fosters trust, and leveraging platform-specific features like Instagram Stories or X polls boosts engagement.
- Respond automatically: Automated responses improve efficiency by handling common inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues.
By integrating these best practices, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and strengthen relationships.
Frequently asked questions
Try social media customer service software for free
Zendesk is the optimal choice for businesses seeking a powerful social media customer service software. Teams can seamlessly manage and respond to customer interactions across platforms—from social media to email and live chat software—all from a centralized workspace. This unified approach eliminates the complexities of juggling multiple interfaces and ensures a consistent, efficient response strategy.
Additionally, our advanced analytics provide invaluable insights into customer interactions, enabling you to gauge performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. Our AI enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of customer service processes, helping agents provide great customer experiences with every interaction.
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