With the latest editions of SugarCRM it's possible to follow twitter conversations and perform LinkedIn lookups from within the CRM without having to go the the relevant website. Although it is possible to pull LinkedIn and Twitter as Web Pages straight onto your home tab (but we'll save that for another post), I am looking at the Social Connectors which allow dynamic content to be drawn into SugarCRM directly.

To do this, simply log into your SugarCRM system as an administrator and click on the admin link at the top right of the screen.

Go down the the Connectors link within the System section and click on it.

The first thing you're going to want to do is Enable the connectors on the require modules. I recommend that you have Twitter on Leads, Contacts and Accounts. This way you are able to put the individual's personal twitter feed on their Lead or Contact record and have the Company's twitter feed on the Account Record.

Click on the Enable Connectors button and you will be presented with a number of social media tabs, inside each of which you can specify which modules it is enabled for. Simply drag them from the Disabled to Enabled columns to enable them.

Once you have decided which modules you want them to be used on (as mentioned, I am only concentrating on Twitter and LinkedIn in this post), click on Save.

In order for LinkedIn and Twitter connectors to work properly, you need to have fields which contain the relevant information.

By default SugarCRM expects the Account name to be that of the LinkedIn company and the person's name to be their Twitter username.

As we know that the latter is very rarely true, it is advisable to make a custom text field in the Studio to store the Twitter username (create a field called twitter_c for example, in the Lead, Contact and Account records and put them somewhere logical (usually near the person or account Name field is a good idea).

In the Map Connector Field settings, you will simply need to tell the connectors which field in the record it should use as its look-up field (e.g. the twitter field you just created).

Once you have linked the fields correctly, again click on Save.

If you return to the front end of your SugarCRM system and populate the fields, you will find you get either an in or t to let you know a link can be made.

Hovering or clicking on this icon will display the LinkedIn information or most recent tweets for that username.

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