Terri Ramsey Beavers In the past, businesses addressed clients’ complaints via telephone and email. As such, standards for effective communication existed to ensure customer reps had the required skills to handle all clients.
For the last decade, much has changed. Now, clients can reach your business through various modern media. In particular, social media has become a go-to communication platform for many customers. Therefore, your business must know how to interact with clients through Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Below are 10 tips regarding social media communication you should know and internalize in your company.
Ensure Fast Response
Social media platforms offer users one of the fastest means of communication. Once the post goes live, it can reach thousands of people within minutes. For this reason, these websites offer you excellent ways of improving your company’s reach. However, if you are not careful, this beneficial outlook can be the source of your problems.
To avoid issues, you should listen and respond to clients’ concerns and questions as quickly as they come. You can achieve this by assigning people responsible for handling round-the-clock communications on each social media platform. Therefore, each agent must have access to customer details and business information. Having agents take shifts works best. You may need to outsource this task to get efficient response time at an affordable rate.
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Give Outstanding Service to Clients
Responding to customers on time is half the work. The other half involves providing excellent service to all your clients. Today, countless people spend time on social media platforms. As such, chances are the clients will try to speak with you through these channels because:
- It has become a popular communication medium;
- It is easy;
- It is fast;
- It does not require writing an email or making a call.
In addition, customers will ask a question or lodge a complaint in public. Doing this forces you to respond with utmost politeness and immediacy. Therefore, you should have customer reps who are punctual, patient, courteous, and experienced. Additionally, you should periodically train your support team on customer service best practices. Also, they need to have access to full and adequate information about your company and its work to answer questions and solve problems effectively.
Make Communication Personal
Most clients want to interact with people when seeking help. They do not want to converse with bots. As such, ensuring customer communication with an actual person is crucial. You should also make communication appear more personal. You can achieve this by responding to a person using their name. Also, the agent responding to the client should sign off all messages with their name. It’s important for your customers to see that they are interacting with a compassionate and understanding human employee rather than a bot. This will give clients faith and confidence that their issues will be taken to heart and resolved by professionals.
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Improve Brand Awareness
Brand awareness aims to get new clients and remind existing ones of your business. It is also an opportunity to showcase the features of your goods or services. Many people learn about products from social media platforms.
The way to improve your brand’s reach is to determine its target audience. Armed with these details, you can develop content that will specifically attract their attention. In the process, you will want to expose readers to what you offer. When you do this, you will encourage people to buy without being too salesy.
Encourage Clients to Leave Reviews
Regardless of the social media platform you use, you will want customers to leave reviews on your products or services. You can place links to review pages to encourage clients to leave reviews. You should allow both positive and negative feedback. In either case, you will want to respond to each customer and address any issues they may have.
Responding to positive reviews is straightforward. All you need to do is to thank the client for their patronage and state you hope to see them soon. On the other hand, handling negative feedback may be tricky. The best thing you can do is to empathize with the client and offer reasonable ways of addressing their concerns.
Encourage Casual Interaction
Although your social media handle is a business platform, you should not make every communication about business. For this reason, your post should aim to connect with clients on different topics. Talking about causes and community activities can encourage readers to engage with your brand. In addition, it is helpful if you post content relevant to seasons and trending events. Applying this strategy can get you a lot of traction. However, it will benefit your brand if you stay clear of controversial topics.
Update Customers on Changes
When you make changes in your business, social media is an excellent tool for telling the world. Hence, you should make posts about new and updated products/services. When you are going to perform system updates that may affect the service you offer clients, you can use these platforms to inform clients. Likewise, you should use the same medium to communicate disruption to service. Using this approach makes customers feel cared for.
Create Groups for Clients
You can create dedicated groups for your customers on social media. You will find this option the most useful if you operate in a B2B market. In particular, LinkedIn gives excellent tools for making a functional virtual group for all your clientele. This platform allows you and other businesses to interact about updates and features about goods and services. It also allows you to guide companies on how to use your products/services.
Hold Contests
Nothing gets people more excited than freebies. As such, you can gain a lot of engagement by hosting occasional contests. In most cases, you will include rules that will make users engage with your content. For example, many brands on Instagram run contests that ask people to like, share, and tag friends to be eligible. This tactic puts your brand in the spotlight and can lead to more sales.
Leverage Data
Having a presence on many social media platforms is excellent publicity. Yet, many of your audience will be more active on specific sites. With the help of customer data, you can easily identify the platforms on which clients interact most with you. This information should help you improve your communication and content on these channels.
Verdict
Social media offer your brand a great chance to reach out to clients. Effective use of these 10 tips will help you capture and retain new and existing customers. Don’t hesitate to venture out and make social media a high-traffic platform for your business.