Social Profile or Social Network Profile
A Social Profile, also called a Social Network Profile, was the social media identity that Salesforce linked to a Contact, Lead, or Account record so reps and agents could see a person's public social presence next to their CRM data.
Definition
A Social Profile, also called a Social Network Profile, was the social media identity that Salesforce linked to a Contact, Lead, or Account record so reps and agents could see a person's public social presence next to their CRM data. It was the user-facing piece of the Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature, and under the hood it mapped to the SocialPersona object, which Salesforce described as a snapshot of a contact's profile on a network such as Facebook or Twitter.
This feature is retired. Salesforce announced the retirement in the Winter '24 release and removed Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads from orgs by the Spring '25 release. After retirement the social network icons and profile viewers no longer appear on records. If you read older documentation, blog posts, or AppExchange listings that mention linking a contact to Twitter or Facebook from inside Salesforce, they are describing this discontinued capability.
How Social Profiles worked, and why they no longer ship
What a Social Profile actually was
A Social Profile was not a stored copy of someone's social account inside your database. It was a live link between a Salesforce record and a public profile on a supported network. Salesforce was explicit about this design: it did not import or store the social information. Each time you opened a linked profile, Salesforce reached out to the network and retrieved the data you wanted to see at that moment. That meant the photo, bio, and recent posts you saw were current rather than a stale cache. The data model behind the feature centered on the SocialPersona object, available from API version 22.0. A SocialPersona row represented one person's identity on one network, so a single Contact could have separate personas for Twitter and Facebook. Companion objects such as SocialPost stored individual posts when the related Social Customer Service feature captured them. The Social Profile that a rep saw on a Contact page was the friendly presentation layer sitting on top of these objects, surfaced through standard page layouts rather than a custom build.
Setting it up and linking a record
Enabling the feature was an admin task. In Salesforce Classic an administrator went to the Social Accounts and Contacts settings under the social apps integration area and switched it on, then chose which networks to allow. Individual users could further pick which of those networks showed up for them through their personal settings, so a rep who only cared about one network was not forced to see the rest. Linking a single record happened inline on the Contact, Lead, or Account page. A user clicked a network icon, completed an OAuth sign-in to that network the first time, and Salesforce searched for matching profiles using the record's name fields. For LinkedIn at the account level the company name helped narrow the match. When the user picked the right profile, Salesforce associated it and could pull the profile photo onto the record. Only a user with edit access to the record could create the link, but once it existed, anyone who could view the record could view the social data, subject to that network's own privacy rules and the viewer's own access on the network.
Networks supported, and the API squeeze
Over its life the feature worked with a shifting set of networks. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were the headline integrations for contacts and leads, and earlier versions also touched services like YouTube and the now-defunct Klout influence score. For accounts, Twitter searched by account name and Facebook looked for company pages, while LinkedIn account-level linking was not offered. The hard part was never the Salesforce side. It was the networks. Social platforms steadily tightened their public APIs and developer terms through the late 2010s and into the 2020s. Twitter, in particular, restructured its API access and pricing in 2023, and Facebook and LinkedIn had already locked down profile data well before that. Each restriction chipped away at how much a tool like this could legally and technically retrieve. A feature that depends on free, open access to other companies' profile data becomes fragile the moment those companies decide that data is a paid product or a closed garden.
When and why it was retired
Salesforce flagged the end in the Winter '24 release notes with a notice that Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads was being retired, then followed up in a later release confirming it was gone. By the Spring '25 timeframe the feature was removed, so orgs on current releases no longer have it. The retirement landed across editions because it was a platform feature rather than a separately licensed add-on. The reasoning followed directly from the API squeeze described above. Salesforce could keep a feature alive only as long as the underlying networks allowed the integration to function. When that access eroded to the point where the experience was unreliable, retiring the feature was cleaner than shipping something that frequently failed to load a profile. Retirement also reduced confusion. A half-working social viewer on every Contact page invites support cases and erodes trust, so removing it entirely was the more honest outcome for users.
What replaced it for social context
There is no one-to-one successor that re-creates a Twitter or Facebook viewer on the Contact page. Instead, the capability split along the two reasons people used social data in the first place: enrichment and service. For data enrichment, the modern path is a dedicated data provider, either a third-party AppExchange enrichment service or Data Cloud, which unifies and enriches profiles from many sources rather than scraping live from one network. For customer service over social channels, Salesforce points teams to its messaging and digital engagement tools and, historically, to Social Studio and Social Customer Service for listening and case creation, though those have their own lifecycle changes worth checking. The practical takeaway is that pulling a person's public profile straight into a CRM record is no longer how Salesforce works. If you need that context today, you source it through a licensed data product, not a built-in social viewer.
What to do with old configuration and references
If you administer an org that used this feature, there is little cleanup required because Salesforce handled the removal. The social network icons simply stopped appearing, and the related personal settings became inert. The main work is documentation hygiene. Internal runbooks, onboarding decks, and admin guides that tell reps to click a Twitter icon on a Contact need to be corrected so new hires are not hunting for a button that no longer exists. Watch for indirect dependencies too. Reports or list views built on the SocialPersona or SocialPost objects, any Apex or integrations that referenced them, and custom buttons that pointed at the social viewer should be reviewed and retired. If a customer or a vendor pitch references Salesforce's native social profile linking as a current selling point, treat that as a sign the material is out of date. Verifying against the current release notes is the safest way to confirm what your org actually has.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Social Profile or Social Network Profile.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Social Profile or Social Network Profile.
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. What is a Social Profile attached to a contact or lead record in Salesforce?
Q2. What most directly affects how much Social Profile data Salesforce can display on a record?
Q3. Which kinds of details does a typical Social Profile carry alongside the CRM record?
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