Expert's Rating
Pros
- Helps keep track of contacts, tasks and deals in a glance
- Finds and offer engagement opportunities and reminds you to keep them
- Offers a centralized way to manage a wide social presence
Cons
- Imported contacts are sometimes messy and require quite a bit of organizing
- Often offers wrong social accounts for contacts
Our Verdict
If you’re managing a large social account, Nimble 3.0 can help you stay on top of your online presence and even expand it.
Nimble is no newbie to the social CRM scene, and has been offering its unified social dashboard for several years now. Nimble 3.0, takes the system a step forward, doing its best to develop superpowers. Nimble 3.0 ($15 per month per user, feature-limited free version for personal use only) is not just about organizing your contacts and interactions: It’s about finding the right people to interact with, and making sure you don’t forget to do so.
Nimble 3.0 is not dissimilar to its previous version, and while there are no significant UI changes, in some aspects it looks like a brand new product. The former Activities, Contacts, Deals, Messages, and Social tabs have been reworked, with the most prominent additions being the Today tab and the Signals tab. The Social tab is missing in action, but your social interactions are still available in other tabs.
As before, Nimble aggregates your online life from Gmail (or any contacts CSV file), Google+, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Twitter, making it equally easy to bore in on a single contact for a wide picture of their online presence, and to keep up with social activities from all your different networks.
The new Today tab is a start page of sorts, featuring engagement opportunities sorted by how good they are (e.g., if a CEO of a big company has a birthday today, that’s better than some lowly worker trying to join your network). It also gives you a nice overlook of tasks due today, and upcoming deals–all of which can be added through Nimble or synced from your Google Calendar. The top of the page features today’s “top 3,” which are a daily choice of interesting contacts pulled from your networks. Every day, you can mark these contacts as important or not, and help Nimble improve. When you mark a contact as important, you get to set a recurring reminder to stay in touch with them, so the connection never falls through the cracks.
The second new tab in Nimble 3.0 is the Signals tab, aimed at helping you pick the signal out from the noise. This is all about social networks, and features as many of them as you added. From here, you can track your notifications, send or schedule status updates or personal messages, and track your own activity; but it also includes the Signals (Beta) tab, which is another way to find important people to engage with.
The Signals tab starts by showing you all important events, such as people who mentioned you, new followers, recently job changes, etc. You can then sort this list according to four different categories (Birthdays, Job changes, New connections, and “RT, tweets, mentions, comments, likes”). You can also view only important people, to narrow things down, assuming Nimble managed to learn who is really important for you.
The last significant new feature in Nimble 3.0 is Search, which is not entirely new, obviously, but was updated to include a sort by last date contacted feature. This is now possible in any contact view—not just when searching—making it easy to see at a glance when any member of the team last contacted this person. The advanced search is pretty powerful, letting you search inside a contact’s name, company, address, social usernames, tags, last contacted date, etc.
Nimble was never really aimed at individuals, but these new features move it even further away from non-business users, and make it even more enticing for companies and teams. Nimble is not a perfect platform, though. Its biggest weakness, in my experience, is a considerable mix-up in contacts management, where I kept being offered the wrong social accounts for my contacts and ended up following random girls on Twitter instead of the contact I was looking at.
Its $15 per user per month pricing is relatively low, but doesn’t include such things a Google Analytics integration. On the other hand, Nimble 3.0 now features integration with a host of new apps such as Quoteroller, MailChimp, Hubspot, Hootsuite, Salesforce, Shopify, and Wufoo, which can easily upgrade its abilities and features.
All in all, Nimble 3.0 is a nice improvement, and while the free trial is now only 14 days long (instead of 30), it’s plenty of time to figure out if it works for you.