Facebook and Salesforce are the leading Social Media and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools respectively. Salesforce Facebook Integration allows businesses to effectively manage their Content, Marketing strategy, Leads, Opportunities, Customer Base, etc. This article will provide you with two easy methods that can help you set up this integration seamlessly.
Table of Contents
What is Facebook?
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Facebook was started as a School-based Social Network at Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg. In 2006, it was opened to all users across the Internet. Since then, Facebook has overtaken MySpace to become the largest Social Media website on the Internet with more than 1 billion active users. Facebook now allows users to post status updates and send messages or call each other to keep in touch with friends and family. Users can choose to share different types of content, like photos, videos, articles, links, etc.
But sharing content on Facebook is different from other types of online communication. Unlike Emails or Instant Messaging, the content that users share on Facebook is more public, which means many other Facebook users will be able to see them. While Facebook offers privacy tools to help users limit who can see the things they share on their profile, it’s essential to understand that Facebook was designed to be more open and social than other traditional communication tools. Facebook’s success can be attributed to its ability to appeal to both general users and businesses.
More information about Facebook can be found here.
What is Salesforce?
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Salesforce is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) available over the Cloud and one of the most popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. It is primarily used by businesses to maintain and manage customer interaction. Salesforce offers a wide variety of in-built applications that are leveraged by various departments in a business, such as Sales, Marketing, Analytics, etc. Salesforce allows users to connect via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and interact with its API to access data and migrate data from other platforms. Some of the key functionalities offered by Salesforce are as follows:
- Contact Management: Salesforce provides critical insights into customer data and history to better understand customer behaviors and patterns.
- Dynamic Dashboards: Salesforce has a dynamic dashboard that features real-time reports to capture Customer Behavior, Market Trends, Sales Records, etc.
- Opportunity Management: Salesforce provides an excellent view of the customer timeline. Businesses can analyze their buying pattern, metrics, purchasing history, etc. Visualization can help an organization identify previously unknown patterns and strategize its decisions.
- Email Integrations: Salesforce allows seamless Email integration with different providers like Outlook, Gmail, etc., to sync calendars and stay up to date with schedules.
More information about Salesforce can be found here.
Why Integrate Facebook and Salesforce?
Here are a few benefits of Salesforce Facebook Integration:
- Through Salesforce Facebook Integration, you can collect your leads in a secure system that makes it simple for you to market, nourish, and target them for sales activities.
- Based on a series of tests carried out by Salesforce to gauge the effectiveness of advertising targeting based on customer data unraveled that ads that were created using Facebook Custom Audiences with Salesforce CRM had very high ad recall and engagement.
- Through Salesforce Facebook Integration, you can easily automate your sales and marketing processes. This makes it easier to target incoming leads with automated messages such as text messages and email messages.
- Through Salesforce Facebook Integration, you can quickly respond to your leads. Once you integrate your Facebook Leads account with Salesforce, you can quickly send messages to incoming leads as they sign up.
How to integrate Facebook Custom Audiences with Salesforce
The fastest way to integrate Facebook Custom Audiences with Salesforce is through LeadsBridge. It allows you to create your Custom Audience without having to download your data from your Salesforce CRM or upload it without hashing it first to Facebook manually. You can refer to this site for more details.
How to integrate Facebook Lead Ads with Salesforce
Even though auto-filling Facebook Lead Ads makes it fairly simple to get users’ information, you can only store the information in a CSV file that can be downloaded. However, with Facebook Lead Ads Salesforce integration, you can store your leads immediately into Salesforce, without the need to manage a CSV file.
This is deemed safe and it saves you time as well. Subsequently, you can even send welcome messages through email and other follow-up emails to your subscribers. This will help you close your deals, nourish your leads, and improve your sales numbers. You can refer to this site, for step-by-step instruction on Salesforce Facebook Lead Ads Integration through LeadsBridge.
How to integrate Facebook Conversions API with Salesforce
Facebook Conversions API is a tool that allows businesses to maintain data privacy and delivered tailored advertising experiences to audiences and customers. Therefore, it lets you control the data you share.
You can leverage LeadsBridge to connect Facebook Conversions API with your Salesforce CRM via an integration layer. This allows you to send new Salesforce records to Facebook Conversions in the form of lead events while creating a new Facebook Conversions API with Salesforce. For step-to-step instructions, you can refer to this site.
Methods to Set up Salesforce Facebook Integration
Users can set up Salesforce Facebook Integration by implementing one of the following methods:
Method 1: Manual Salesforce Facebook Integration
Setting up Salesforce Facebook Integration manually is quite a lengthy task since it requires the users to write Java code in Salesforce. Additionally, knowledge of HTML is required to visualize the necessary data. Users can manually set up Salesforce Facebook Integration by implementing the following steps:
- Login to developers.facebook.com and create an application. You will then need to make the application live to exchange the data and set up Salesforce Facebook Integration.
- Now navigate to Tools > Graph API and generate the token as shown in the following image and save it in a secure location.
- Navigate to Salesforce and log in with your credentials.
- In Salesforce, on the search bar, search for VisualForce Page.
- Once the page is up, provide a suitable name, label, and add some visual markup to enable the preview.
- Once added, click on Save. If you see an error asking you to create an Apex Class, click on Quick Save.
- Now that you have created a VisualForce page, you have to make Apex Class provide an Abstraction Layer. In Salesforce, to create an Apex Class, click your name in the upper right corner of the screen. In the dropdown menu, click Developer Console.
- In the Developer Console, click File > New > Apex Class.
- Provide the name of the Apex class as JSON2Apex with the following code:
public class JSON2Apex {
public String id;
public String name;
public String website;
public String fan_count;
public String posts;
public class Paging{
public Cursors cursors;
public String next;
}
public class Posts{
public List<Data> data;
public Paging paging;
}
public class Cursors{
public String before;
public String after;
}
public class Data{
public String created_time;
public String message;
public String id;
public String story;
}
public static JSON2Apex parse(String json){
return (JSON2Apex) System.JSON.deserialize(json,JSON2Apex.class);
}
}
- You now have to create another Apex Class to send HTTP requests to Facebook and request the data.
- Follow the same procedure and create a new Apex Class named testfbpage1 with the following code and your ID and Access Token from the Graph API:
public with sharing class testfbpage1 {
public String id1{get;set;}
public String name1{get;set;}
public String website1{get;set;}
public String fancount1{get;set;}
public testfbpage1()
{
Http http = new Http();
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
req.setEndPoint('https://graph.facebook.com/32033364?fields=id,name,website,fan_count,posts&access_token=');
req.setMethod('GET');
HttpResponse res = http.send(req);
String str = res.getBody();
JSON2Apex myClass = JSON2Apex.parse(str);
id1=myClass.id;
name1 = myClass.name;
website1 = myClass.website;
fancount1 = myClass.fan_count;
}
}
- The above code will send an HTTP request to Facebook, parse the JSON body to extract fields, and then assign these values to variables.
- Now that you have the variables, update the VisaualForce Page HTML box with the following code:
<apex:page controller="testfbpage1" title="read data from FB Page">
<apex:pageBlock title="Facebook Page Details">
<apex:outputText value="{!id1}">Page Id: </apex:outputText>/></br>
<apex:outputText value="{!name1}">Page Name: </apex:outputText>/></br>
<apex:outputText value="{!website1}">Page Website: </apex:outputText>/></br>
<apex:outputText value="{!fancount1}">Page Fancount: </apex:outputText>/></br>
</apex:pageBlock>
</apex:page>
- Once done, click on Save and then click on Preview.
- A new page will now open which will show all your data from Facebook. You can now perform the necessary operations with this data as per business and data requirements.
Method 2: Salesforce Facebook Integration using Hevo Activate
Hevo Activate helps you directly transfer data from Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Facebook, etc., and 100+ other sources (including 30+ free sources) to CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, various SaaS applications, Data Warehouses, and a lot more, in a completely hassle-free & automated manner. Hevo Activate is fully managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
Hevo Activate takes care of all your data preprocessing needs and lets you focus on key business activities, and draw a much powerful insight on how to generate more leads, retain customers, and take your business to new heights of profitability. It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination.
Check out what makes Hevo Activate amazing:
- Real-time Data Transfer: Hevo Activate, with its strong Integration with 100+ sources, allows you to transfer data quickly & efficiently. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to transfer.
- Secure: Hevo Activate has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Tremendous Connector Availability: Hevo Activate houses a large variety of connectors and lets you bring in data from numerous Marketing & SaaS applications, databases, etc. such as Airflow, HubSpot, Marketo, MongoDB, Oracle, Salesforce, Redshift, etc. in an integrated and analysis-ready form.
- Simplicity: Using Hevo Activate is easy and intuitive, ensuring that your data is exported in just a few clicks.
- Completely Managed Platform: Hevo Activate is fully managed. You need not invest time and effort to maintain or monitor the infrastructure involved in executing codes.
- Live Support: The Hevo Activate team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
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Conclusion
This article provided you with a simplified guide on setting up Salesforce Facebook Integration manually or automatically using Hevo. There are, however, certain limitations associated with the manual method. The manual method is considered error-prone and requires experienced developers with coding knowledge to develop and maintain the integration. You can also consider Zendesk for your use case and have a look at this in-depth Salesforce vs Zendesk guide. To get ease with working on different Salesforce Dashboards, you can check out this Salesforce Dashboard guide.
The limitations can be overcome using platforms like Hevo Activate. It helps you directly transfer data from a source of your choice such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Facebook, etc., to any SaaS application, CRMs like Salesforce, etc., in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly for free. It will make your life easier and make data migration hassle-free. It is user-friendly, reliable, and secure.
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Vishal has a passion towards the data realm and applies analytical thinking and a problem-solving approach to untangle the intricacies of data integration and analysis. He delivers in-depth researched content ideal for solving problems pertaining to modern data stack.