Social Media positively influences sales and improves brand loyalty and connections to a large extent. It plays a significant role in customer support service. From a business perspective it saves a lot of time and money. Additionally social media platforms allow you to reach a much wider group of customers than traditional methods. As per Statista 4.41 billion people will use social media by 2025. It is an excellent channel for customer care as it is so immediate and accessible. 76 of people who message a business on a social media platform do so for customer service or support. The mutual benefits of easy brand accessibility via Instagram Twitter Facebook or YouTube allow easy customer contact and engaging social interaction. Around 47 of US consumers have a favorable view of a brand that responds to customer service questions on social media. Here is a list of the top five ways to use social media to extend customer support: 1- Consider Setting up a Dedicated Social Handle for Social Media Customer Support The Marketing Land says that failing to respond can lead to a 43 decrease in customer advocacy while a reply can increase it by 20. A brand needs to use a separate social account specifically dedicated to customer support. For example Hootsuite uses @Hootsuite_Help and BestBuy uses @BestBuySupport as a customer support platform on social media. Using a separate social account will help you filter out and flag any support and service issue from your primary channel. As per Convince and Convert around 42 of consumers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes. Also failure to respond on social channels leads to a 15 increase in churn rate for existing customers. A dedicated social media account for customer support also enables you to address customer support questions faster and in detail. A fast and detailed response that resolves issues helps you to satisfy and retain frustrated customers. Also include a link to your main account to increase the reach of your dedicated social handle for social media customer support. 2- Incorporate Social Listening into Your Strategy Increased customer expectation for rapid response customer support through social media channels has made the social listening solution a necessity for customer support and community management in 2021. As per Socialbakers 51 of brands utilize social listening in any capacity. Social listening involves monitoring social conversations around various topics. It allows you to understand why where and how these conversations are happening and what people think and feel. It also helps you understand what is important to your audience and identify trends that your target audience is following. Here is an example when Best Buy did not receive a direct @ mention on Twitter by the customer. But incorporating social listening helped Best Buy to respond with a helpful message suggesting a product specific to the customers pain point. You can either manually check all your notifications across all the social media platforms or use a social listening tool to do it for you. The efficient way to see posts that did not tag your brands social media profile is to use a tool. Choose a listening tool that brings forth actionable data measures sentiment and integrates effortlessly into your business strategy. Various social listening tools offer paid and free tools to track monitor and notify you when conversations are happening. The best tools are Google Alerts and Mention. 3- Use Social Tools to Support Customer Service Monitor customer service activities on Facebook Twitter Instagram and other platforms using tools such as Zendesk. It offers the ability to listen to consumers across multiple platforms. It automatically converts conversations on these platforms into tickets allowing agents to respond to and resolve issues effectively. Here youll find the type of tools you can use to support your customer service needs: Chatbots: Chatbots offer 24/7 social customer service. Chatbots provide immediate responses to customers so that they do not have to wait for long. They are more affordable than hiring a human customer service agent and work best for simple questions that you get often. Messaging apps: Messaging apps communicate directly with your customers. It helps your customers to contact you personally so you can handle matters privately. Live chat: Live chat is a great option as it provides quick responses from real live-chat representatives. Neil Patel used this strategy and saw a dramatic increase in inquiries leading to new business. Tracking systems: Tracking systems measures the impact of your customer service efforts on social media. It gives you insights into how long it takes for your business to respond to messages and resolve issues. 4- Use Social Media Communities Social media communities can be an organized page and group that your audience engages with. It can also be an undefined but active follower base that is highly engaged with your organic content strategy. Social media platforms provide you a great opportunity for your brand to build a community. More specifically Facebook allows you to create private and public groups. Create a Facebook group for your customers to join. Once joining the group the members can start discussions share opinions ask questions and communicate about your products or services. For example MobileMonkeys has a Facebook group named MobileMonkey Island. It allows members to ask questions and share knowledge about Facebook Messenger chatbot marketing and advanced Facebook Ads with MobileMonkey. You can use an external Facebook social inbox tool like Sotrender to help you in navigating your daily tasks. Ensure that you establish your community rules and assign moderators to keep the group running smoothly. Similarly you can use Instagram to build a community. For example Summer Fridays use Instagram stories to ask their audience to share what products they would like to see next using real-time customer demand. Glossier Summer Fridays and Create amp; Cultivate are community-orientated brands that have seen huge success on Instagram. There are helpful tools for making the most of your Instagram community such as Statigram Webstagram and Nitrogram. 5- Focus on Creating a Customer Advocate Base A customer advocacy base is a group of loyal trusted customers and employees who can speak out in favor of your brand. As per Convince and Convert 45 of customers will share their positive experience if a brand responds helpfully to an issue. One of the first things customers usually do when they have a bad experience with your brand is to write a negative review online. Therefore instead of responding to a negative comment your strategy should be to provide excellent customer service creating a strong loyal customer base that will advocate for your brand. Final Thoughts Social media is a valuable channel for marketers to reach and convert customers. These platforms have evolved to be more than marketing and advertising platforms. They are important channels for businesses to provide customer service especially with the rise of a conversational business. An unanswered customer complaint on social media lowers consumer loyalty by 50. Therefore monitoring your brands social media pages and understanding how to use the platforms effectively can up your support game. The better you get at providing customer support on social media the more traffic you can expect there. 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