Social media platforms are gaining popularity for being used by businesses to promote their products and services. Companies are realizing the extent of influence social media posts have on their users and are coming up with new ways of using social media influencers to increase their sales.
Most social media sites were built with the sole purpose of letting users interact with each other through the internet. Posts used to be shared for fun and personal information was displayed voluntarily to show to friends, peers, and relatives. But today, social media sites are not just social platforms. First, businesses started including social media in their advertising strategies; and now, social media sites and apps are also being used to provide excellent customer support for businesses to their audience.
Social media customer service is among the most instant kind of customer support businesses offer these days. Instead of using emails or contact forms, customers like to contact businesses through social media, because they are more adept at using social media to interact with simply anyone in the world.
Since customers trust and rely on social media customer service more than any other means of customer service, businesses have to shift their focus from the other means to offering support to their customers via social media.
Social media customer service comes in many forms. It includes not only allowing customers to contact you through social media messengers but also integrating social media with official websites.
There are certain social media customer service best practices that these businesses need to follow if they want it to work wonders.
Social media customer care makes customers feel at home during their interaction with a business or brand. They feel like they are being given very personalized service. That’s why they often provide more honest feedback on social media customer support than on any other platform, such as a survey created on a third-party website.
Using social media for customer service is becoming more and more common as businesses struggle to establish a solid online presence for their brand. Every business wants to be on the internet these days. Many businesses are even making sales through the internet. Thus, most businesses are learning how to provide social media support as well, as that is also offered via the internet.
There are different ways to deliver good social media customer service, some of which are discussed below. As social media sites evolve and new social media platforms emerge, these tactics will also keep evolving and becoming more creative. Businesses need to keep themselves up to date with the changing trends in social media. Those that can provide social media customer support in the most convenient and creative ways will win over their competitors.
A business that regularly conducts a SWOT analysis to aid in its growth can monitor new social media marketing strategies, and will keep itself updated with new tactics to provide social media customer care.
5 Ways to Deliver Social Media Customer Service
Here are 5 ways that currently exist and are being explored by businesses to provide social media customer service.
1. Setup Auto Responses on Social Media Messengers
When customers contact a business with an inquiry, they usually expect an instant response. Therefore, most customers prefer to contact businesses via social media, since they know it is hard to avoid someone on, for instance, Facebook messenger.
But we are all still humans. Unless you hire a robot, you cannot respond to each of your customers’ queries right on the spot. Therefore, the popular social media sites have the auto-response feature available in their messengers. In Facebook Messenger, for example, you can key in the answers to the most typically asked questions by customers.
The least a customer wants to hear when they contact a business is that their message has been received on the other side. So even if you cannot answer questions in auto-responses, the least you can do is set up auto-responses that inform the customer that you have received their message and will reply to it shortly. This is a good way of using social media customer service.
2. Integrate Social Media With Your Website
As mentioned earlier, it is always a good idea to integrate social media with your business or brand website. If your website is built on Strikingly, this can be done in several ways.
- Insert social media icons on your website’s footer.
- Add live chat on your website with Facebook Messenger.
- Add a social feed section on your website
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If your website is built on Strikingly, it is simple to add a social feed on your landing page.
Image taken from Strikingly
These strategies line up the marketing efforts on your website with those on your social media pages. These are all part of providing good social media customer service. This integration not only benefits customers and makes it easy for them to get in touch with you, but also enhances your overall brand image.
3. Allow Social Login on Your Website or App
Customers feel a lot more convenient if they can log in to websites or apps using their social media profiles. Allowing social login to your official website is a way of offering social media customer service. It is simple for customers because when they log in via their social media accounts; they have one less password to remember. In fact, they do not even need to key in any password in this case. They simply click on the social login button and are automatically logged in to the website. Customers really enjoy this kind of social media support.
This benefits the business too because they get access to all the information about the customer that he/she has shared on their social media profile. This is very good for the business of building a buyer persona, and figuring out if the person who just logged in is an ideal customer for your business or not.
Although this is not a way to directly interact with your customers, it is still a means of offering social media customer care by offering them an easy way to sign in to your site or app.
4. Build an Online Community on Social Media
This is mostly referred to as creating a Facebook Group for your brand, which serves as a brand community. You can choose to develop a brand community on some other platform as well, but a community that’s built in a Facebook Group is usually the most effective. It acts to provide social media customer service to all those who join the group.
Since most people are familiar with the rules and template of Facebook Groups, they find it easy to interact there with others. They know how to create a poll, how to make announcements, how to comment on posts, and how to make their own posts. This saves time, as you don’t need to train them to teach them how to interact with others in the community.
For your online community to bring any benefit or results for you, it needs to be a comfortable place for your customers to take part in. When your customers are well-equipped with the skills to use a certain platform, they will use it at their best to get all the answers they need about your business. Therefore, using social media for customer service works so well.
You can also get all the answers you need from your customer by providing social media customer service in this way. Your customers will give you more honest feedback in such a community than via a response to an email that you send to them.
At Strikingly, we have our brand community in the form of our knowledge-base help centre.
5. Use Instagram Stories for Promoting Your Brand
Instagram stories are gaining popularity in terms of businesses using them for running their ads. Some businesses use Instagram stories as part of their organic marketing strategies, while others run paid ads in them.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
When customers react to your Instagram story, they are actually giving you feedback about your brand or your products. Reactions are given on Instagram stories by swiping up from the bottom edge of your phone screen or by tapping on the message bar. There you can type a message, or simply send a GIF or an emoji. This is how you get social media support from your customers.
This strategy is included in the means of offering social media customer service because once you see how the users are reacting to your Instagram stories, you can tailor your future inbound marketing efforts and customer service in ways that suit your customers more.
At Strikingly, we provide our users with full customer support via email, and via our live chat support.
Image taken from Strikingly
We also like to educate our users about web development in our Strikingly blog. We are always there to give a boost to your business by resolving your queries, solving any technical issues you might face while building your Strikingly website, and interacting with you continually in our help center.
We offer social media customer support as well. You can contact us via our Facebook page or Twitter account should you have any concerns. We are aware of the importance of using social media for customer support, and make full use of social media for keeping in touch with our users.
