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Social Key

Social Key was a Data.com Clean feature that automatically matched a Contact or Lead, never an Account, to its public social profiles and wrote the resulting handles onto the record. It is retired.…

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Definition

Social Key was a Data.com Clean feature that automatically matched a Contact or Lead, never an Account, to its public social profiles and wrote the resulting handles onto the record.

It is retired. Salesforce lists Data.com Social Key on its Past Product and Feature Retirements page with a timing of Spring '16, February 2016, so the feature stopped working when each org was upgraded to that release.

Nothing native replaced the matching. Salesforce now points orgs that want social profiles on records to AppExchange.

A two-column comparison. Social Key matched a record to a social handle and stored it, retiring in Spring 2016. The viewer displayed live social content and retired in Spring 2024.
Old screenshots showing a social panel prove the viewer was on, not that Social Key was still matching handles behind it.
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In plain English

👋 Study buddy

“Salesforce used to have a helper that went looking for your customers' social media accounts by itself. When it found one, it saved the username on their record so nobody had to search. Salesforce switched that helper off in early 2016. Finding those accounts is a manual job now.”

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Worked example

scenario · real-world use

Picture an admin at a regional insurance brokerage auditing an org that has been live since 2014. On the Lead record for Priya Raman, Title of VP Operations and Company of Northwind Freight, sits a Twitter handle nobody remembers typing. It arrived from Social Key, which ran inside a nightly Data.com Clean job and matched the lead's name and company against public social data. The admin goes hunting for the setting that refreshes it and finds nothing. Social Key stopped running at Spring '16, and the Data.com nodes later left Setup. That handle is a decade-old snapshot with nothing behind it.

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How Social Key worked, and what it left behind

A matcher bolted onto Data.com Clean

Clean compared your Account, Contact, and Lead fields against the Data.com database and refreshed stale values like title and phone. Social Key rode the same jobs but not the same objects. Salesforce is exact about it: clean jobs run for accounts, contacts, and leads, while Social Key finds social handles for contacts and leads only. On a contact or lead it read the name and company already there, then wrote the handle.

Where the handles actually landed

You picked which networks to enable, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, and Clean wrote a field per network. The implementation guide records an odd asymmetry. Those fields could go on contact list views, never on lead list views. So a lead could carry a handle you had no easy way to surface in bulk.

The match API closed at the same time

The Winter '16 release notes carry the primary announcement, and they close two doors at once: Data.com Social Key and the Data.com Social Profile Match API. No scheduled job, no programmatic lookup. The note states the fallback plainly. Handles stopped being added by Clean, and you could still associate them by hand.

What a leftover handle means today

Treat any Social Key reference as documentation debt. When a Data.com contract expired, Salesforce removed the Data.com features, objects, and fields from the org. Handles written before February 2016 still sit in fields, unverified and a decade stale. Find the reports and automations that read one, then decide whether it should steer anything.

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Trust & references

Sources

Cross-checked against the following references.

Official documentation

Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Social Key.

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About the Author

Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He writes and edits salesforcedictionary.com, published by KineticBit Inc., to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.

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Test your knowledge

+5 pts / day

Q1. When did Salesforce retire Data.com Social Key?

Q2. What was Social Key's actual job in an org?

Q3. An admin finds a stale Twitter handle on a Contact in a legacy org and wants it refreshed automatically. What is the correct advice?

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