Social media is a powerful tool for small businesses, allowing you to connect with current customers, create conversations, and share your business with a larger audience to find potential new customers. Social media can also be an effective customer support tool, allowing you to respond directly to customers’ questions, concerns, and other issues.
Tips for Using Social Media as a Customer Support Tool
Creating a Plan
Create a plan for how your company will respond to customers’ messages, comments, and posts about your business.
The plan should include things such as:
- Tone of voice.
- What type of comments should you reply to, and what types should you not reply to.
- When to take a conversation from the comment section to Direct Messages.
- When to take the conversation off social media and move them to other methods of communication like emails or phone calls.
- Creating answers for FAQs.
Each business is different; your social media customer service plan should reflect how you want your business to be seen by your customers and the public.
Act Fast
Prompt responses are essential when replying to comments and direct messages on social media. Waiting extended periods to respond can lead to lost sales, frustrated customers, customers going to other companies, and damage to the business’s reputation.
Your average response time will vary from platform to platform. For example, Facebook’s “Very Responsive to messages” Badge will appear on your page if you respond to 90% or more of the messages you get and have a response time under 15 minutes. This doesn’t mean you have to be monitoring your messages 24/7. You can use automated responses, move irrelevant messages to the spam folder, and set your away status.
More on Facebook’s “Very Responsive to Messages” Badge.
Use Social Listening
When customers post on social media mentioning your business, they don’t always tag you. That means you’ll have to use social listening practices like monitoring keywords specific to your business to find conversations happening on social media that you may have missed.
Here’s an example of Taco Bell using social listening to engage with a customer who didn’t tag them in their original tweet.