Social Accounts and Contacts
Social Accounts and Contacts was a Salesforce feature that linked account, contact, and lead records to public social media profiles, so users could see basic social details next to their CRM data.
Definition
Social Accounts and Contacts was a Salesforce feature that linked account, contact, and lead records to public social media profiles, so users could see basic social details next to their CRM data. It worked with networks like Twitter (later X), Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and surfaced the data through a Social Profiles related list and, in Lightning Experience, a Social Accounts component.
This feature is retired. Salesforce wound it down after Twitter/X revoked the public API access the feature relied on, with the breaking change landing around August 2023. The integration stopped returning social data, and Salesforce removed the feature rather than keep a broken connection. If you still see references to it in an older org, treat them as legacy artifacts, not a working integration.
How it worked, why it broke, and what to use now
What the feature actually did
Social Accounts and Contacts arrived in the Spring '12 release. The idea was simple. A sales or service rep opening an account, contact, or lead record could see that person's public social presence without leaving Salesforce. The feature did not copy a full social profile into your database. Instead it stored a small link between the Salesforce record and a matched social handle, then pulled basic public details on demand. A rep might see a contact's profile photo, a short bio, a job title pulled from LinkedIn, or recent public posts from Twitter. The supported networks shifted over the years, but the common set included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, with Klout in the early days. Person accounts were supported too, since they behave like a hybrid of account and contact. The point was context. Knowing a prospect's role, interests, or recent public activity helped reps tailor outreach and build rapport. It was never meant to be a system of record. The social data lived behind the network's own API and terms, so what you saw depended entirely on what each platform chose to expose.
The Social Profiles related list and the Lightning component
Reps interacted with the feature in two main places. In Salesforce Classic, a Social Accounts and Contacts viewer appeared on the record's social tab, and matched profiles showed in a Social Profiles related list. An admin could add that related list to account, contact, and lead page layouts so the social section was visible by default. In Lightning Experience, the same data surfaced through a Social Accounts component that you dropped onto the record page in the Lightning App Builder. The first time a user opened a record, they were prompted to sign in to the relevant social network and confirm the right profile match. That sign-in was per user, which mattered for governance. Each rep authenticated with their own social credentials, so the data they saw reflected their own access to each network. Because matching was assisted rather than automatic, reps sometimes had to pick the correct profile from a few candidates. Once linked, the association persisted on the record, and the viewer refreshed the public details whenever the network's API allowed it.
Why Salesforce retired it
The feature depended on third-party social APIs that Salesforce did not control. That dependency was its weak point. When Twitter rebranded to X and overhauled its developer platform in 2023, it revoked the free public API access that many integrations used. Salesforce flagged that the change could take effect as early as August 23, 2023, and that Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads would stop connecting to Twitter/X as a result. With the most heavily used network gone and the remaining ones offering thinner public data than they once did, the feature no longer delivered on its promise. Salesforce announced the retirement in the 2023 release notes and removed the functionality rather than ship a half-working tool. This is a recurring pattern with social integrations. A platform tightens or paywalls its API, and any product built on free access has to change or shut down. Social Accounts and Contacts is a clear example of how external API policy, not a Salesforce decision about value, can end a feature's life.
What happened to your existing data
The retirement is easier to reason about once you remember the feature stored very little. It kept the link between a Salesforce record and a social handle, plus whatever limited details the viewer had last shown. It did not maintain a rich, synced copy of each social profile inside your org. So when the integration stopped working, there was no large data migration to run and no warehouse of social posts to export. The Social Profiles related list and the social viewer simply stopped returning live information. In an org that used the feature years ago, you might still find a leftover related list on a page layout or stale references in reports. Those are safe to remove. Admins cleaning up after the retirement usually just pull the Social Profiles related list off account, contact, and lead layouts and delete any Lightning component instances that referenced it. There is no setting you must keep enabled, because the underlying connection no longer functions regardless of the toggle's state.
How it differed from Social Customer Service
People often confuse Social Accounts and Contacts with Social Customer Service, and they were genuinely different products. Social Accounts and Contacts was a sales-context tool. It enriched account, contact, and lead records with public profile snippets so reps had background on the person. Social Customer Service was a service tool built on the social persona and social post objects. It let support agents receive inbound social messages, create cases from them, and reply to customers on social channels from inside the console. One was about passive context on a record, the other about active two-way conversations and case management. Social Customer Service also went through its own changes, with Salesforce steering customers toward partner solutions and the broader Service Cloud and Digital Engagement stack for social messaging. If your goal is to handle inbound social messages today, you look at those service options. If your goal was the old enrich-a-record behavior, that specific feature is simply gone, and you fill the gap differently.
What to use instead today
There is no one-to-one replacement that ships in the platform, because the gap is really about access to social data, not Salesforce capability. For surfacing social profile details on a record, the common path now is an AppExchange app that holds its own paid agreements with the social networks and pushes data into Salesforce fields or a related list. For broader account and contact enrichment, teams lean on data services and partner tools that supply firmographic and contact details, sometimes including social handles, through supported APIs. For handling inbound social messages and cases, the answer sits in Service Cloud's social and messaging channels rather than this retired sales feature. The honest takeaway for architects is to avoid building core processes on free third-party social APIs. They change without much notice. If social context genuinely drives revenue for your team, budget for a vendor that maintains compliant, paid access and treats that data as a supported product, so a single platform policy change does not silently break your workflow.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Social Accounts and Contacts.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Social Accounts and Contacts.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. Which social networks have historically been supported by Social Accounts and Contacts?
Q2. How should reps treat the social data surfaced by Social Accounts and Contacts?
Q3. What does the Social Accounts and Contacts feature do in Salesforce?
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