If you’ve ever worked as a community manager, you know the stress that may come with having to respond to social media users quickly. In addition, while quickness is important, it’s not as important as providing accurate and helpful replies.
In this piece, I examine ways to strengthen your social media response plan to better address consumer concerns and develop a reputation in the eyes of your target audience.
The use of social media to communicate with clients has become standard practise
If consumers have questions, concerns, or feedback about your business, they will likely go there first. But, there are still businesses that don’t view social inboxes as serious channels for communicating with customers.
Their loss, unfortunately. And the numbers back that up.
If you have an issue and want it solved, social media is the second best way to do it, behind picking up the phone.
The “always-on” culture of the modern period has a direct impact on the speed with which we expect responses to be made, and social media has therefore increased expectations for response times. In today’s day of instant gratification and instant communication, a response time of 48 hours or more to a consumer complaint is often unacceptable.
You can technically still do it (and many companies do it). Nonetheless, data shows that at least 48% of customers need an answer to their social media queries or complaints within 12 hours. Moreover, Convince&Convert reports that the average response time to a social media complaint is 5 hours, with 40% of customers expecting a response within an hour.
Having a plan in place to respond to social media comments may boost business and keep customers coming back.
Let’s take another look at these numbers:
Twitter users who receive a reply from a company are more likely to make a repeat purchase, and are ready to pay an extra 3% to 30% as a result.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they have more faith in a firm after communicating with it via direct message.
Convince&Convert found that responding to a customer complaint might improve advocacy by 25%, whereas ignoring a complaint could lower it by 50%.
Customers may perceive you as uncaring and unresponsive if you do not reply to their comments and messages promptly (or at all). Also, they express their anger and displeasure online much more. As always, the cycle goes on. (Another interesting fact: 47% of customers will tell others about a negative interaction with a company’s customer care department. A quarter of them (24%) plan to do so using social media.
Methods for enhancing your social media reaction time
Incorporate online messaging platforms into your existing customer support processes
Comments or complaints might be easily missed, especially if you have a large number of clients or a large number of avenues through which to reach them.
That’s why it’s important for your support staff to have social media profiles and the means to manage client interactions on those platforms. Having established processes with rules on who interacts with what material and when is crucial.
As a hub for group communication and collaboration, the NapoleonCat Social Inbox is an invaluable tool. If you don’t know the solution right away, you may use it to ask the proper people for help, appoint moderators, and distribute work to other members of your team.
No more worrying about missing a review or update on a social media platform because they are all in one place with Google (and leave someone without a reply.)
Keeping an eye on:
- Private communications on social media platforms
- Reactions posted to social media sites
- Social media buzz, including tweets, Facebook wall posts, and mentions
- Feedback from Google and Facebook
Be alerted and act quickly when problems arise
If you’re a social media manager or community manager and you’ve never had to put out a fire, aka a social media crisis, consider yourself lucky. Unfortunately, some businesses are fully aware of that fact.
There is nothing worse than forgetting about a growing thread of complaints about your business on Facebook over the weekend, only to discover it when you return to the office on Monday.
Improvements to the handling of frequently asked questions
When you get a lot of inquiries about a single aspect of your business, like a product’s price or how a certain feature functions, automation may be a huge time saver. In addition, letting consumers believe they are being heard might help you provide better customer service.
Classify and prioritise content
Brand involvement is essential, and social media is not simply for customer service (and usually, the primary reason brands go on social in the first place). But, if there are several individuals talking to you at once, you may become confused and overwhelmed. Not just when someone is complaining, but also when they have a query or a remark to your engagement post, all of these interactions necessitate a response.
Excellent material posted by a company that is unresponsive or takes too long to respond will hurt the company’s reputation with consumers. Having a dialogue with a brand and then hearing nothing back is a unique sort of frustrating.
Take charge of the feedback for your sponsored posts
You’ve probably come across promoted posts on Facebook that still have comments from days (or even weeks) ago that haven’t been deleted or purged. Assuming they are positive responses, this becomes less of an issue (which you should reply to as well, by the way). What if, however, they are spam or bad remarks (as in, “hey, but what about my complaint from [insert date two months ago]?”)? These can completely derail your ad or, at the very least, reduce its effectiveness without moderation.