Businesses love sharing news about their latest products, attaching appealing, pretty photos or videos to their brand, and interacting with users. While all of this is great and benefits your brand, people know all about that already. Others have written about it, we’ve written about. But customer service on social media is something that doesn’t get the attention it rightly deserves.

Customer service and social media

Here’s why you should consider using social media for your customer service:

• Respond instantly. Social media is all about people sharing and reacting to each other almost instantly. Using platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you can instantly respond to your customers needs or requests. Your clients will appreciate not racking up a phone bill just trying to contact you.
• It’s simple. Social media has a global average penetration rate of 31%. As of late 2016, Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users. That means most of your users probably have it. Things become much easier for you and for them when you can resolve their issues without them having to call you, create an account for your site, or use a less popular service.
• Connect with users organically. Social media is a natural method of communication for most people. Just look at all the people are glued to their phones and social media apps, no matter where they go. Offering your customer service through it will make your users more comfortable.
• Take complaints privately. A lot of people complain about products and brands publicly on social media. If your customer service team uses Facebook or Twitter, you can address these problems directly and ask them to discuss their complaints privately. This way, you help your customer and you quickly prevent them from spreading too much negativity about your product, service, or brand.
• Turn complaints into unique improvements. Clients can offer tons of insight on social media that you won’t get elsewhere. You can use it to improve your product/service, or get inspired to do something special for your customers.

That’s the simple sum of it. But this doesn’t mean that you should abandon all other customer service methods. The more ways customers can contact you, the better!

Analyzing your customer service

Sotrender analyzes your social media performance in tons of different areas. And one of those is your customer service. We look at a few different metrics to see how your customer service is doing, which are:

Response rate. See how often you reply to your user’s posts. The lower the percent, the less you respond to them. If it gets too low, you need to start doing more.

Response time. How long it took your brand to respond to a user. You’ll want to respond as quickly as possible, keeping your audience satisfied. That is, as long as you know how to appropriately deal with their issues.

Negative feedback. Check how much negative feedback you’re getting from users. We count users hiding a post, hiding all posts, reporting spam, or unliking a page as negative feedback. This helps you identify what actions on social media your users don’t like, and where you should focus your customer service on.

Community ranking. See which users are active on your page, along with the segment they belong to. Are users likers, only liking your page, or are they debaters, engaging more on your content. If you know how your audience reacts, you will know what to prepare for them.

Community ranking in Sotrender

And don’t forget about Sotrender’s Fanpage and Twitter Trends UK reports! That’s where you’ll get tons of insightful data about customer service from brands across over 20 unique industries.

Many UK brands are effectively using social media for a better customer service; Facebook Trends UK, July 2017.

Social media customer service done right

Here are some examples of brands doing customer service well on social media. Use it as inspiration should you implement customer service into your social media activities.

Nike responds quickly, politely, and helpfully.

Nike on Twitter is a example of good practices when it comes to social media and customer service.

Jet Blue takes customer complaints seriously and shows they want to take action.

Jet Blue is ready to help their customers trough social media.

Xbox takes their social media seriously. Informative, set hours, and a large team to answer client needs.

Xbox has a good strategy and they’re helping their clients trough Twitter.

Moderate your social media channels

It’s time to put those metrics to good use. If your audience is primarily communicating with you on your Facebook page, you need to manage it efficiently. How can you do that using Sotrender? Sotrender is now also a Social Inbox for Facebook, which means it can meet your analytics and community management needs. Here are just a few benefits of using Sotrender’s Social Inbox:

• Getting updates in real-time. Don’t need to refresh the page each time.
• Post and ad previews. You’ll always know what is the context of the conversation and what your users are responding to.
• Gmail-style conversation threading. Keep track of an individual user’s comments. No more endless scrolling.
• Comment history (from the moment you activate moderation). This includes deleted or hidden comments.
• Tracking changes other moderators have made. You’ll always know who is doing their part.

Sotrender’s Social Inbox

Did we pique your interest? You can find out more on our blog post that goes into more detail.

Want to provide the best customer service possible on social media? Start analyzing and moderating!