While I’m sure we can all agree that every business should craft their own unique strategy for social media, the beginning and end of all social strategies should all focus on one thing.
They must see social media as an opportunity to help customers.
Four years ago, the conversation around social media was, “Why do I need this?” The conversation has now changed to, “I know my company/brand needs this, and while I’m not sure why, I just know we need to be marketing on social media.”
The Harvest Business Review came out with an article today that’s going to help answer the why. Their research shows that while social media usage continues to grow in every demographic, each group sees social media has a leading source for customer service. If it wasn’t before, it’s now abundantly clear that brands need to worry about customer service on Social Media
My plan here is to share some of their findings, but I STRONGLY suggest reading their full article here.
No Matter the Age of your Customers, They Are On Social Media
- People under 35 spend almost four hours per day on social media: But the important part about this is that the majority of those four hours is spent engaging with brands. Is your brand prepared? Is someone monitoring and responding to questions on social media?
- The percentage of people who have used Twitter for customer service leapt nearly 70%, from 22 to 35% from 2013-14
- 17% of people older than 55 prefer social media over telephone for service: That’s nearly 1 out of 5 people over 55 years old that want to hear from you on social media.
- Nearly half of people earning more than $200K per year prefer social media over live interactions for customer service: Brands needing to reach executives and business owners need to pay attention to social media.
Building an Effective Social CRM to increase Social Media ROI
They found that the companies that are able to prove social ROI most clear are doing two things very well: they’ve built a social media CRM to increase relevance and focus on complete customer care.
As we all should know, those who perform best in social are typically seen with interactions with customers that are personal, genuine, and relevant. This can be hard for small to medium sized businesses as they either don’t have the staff to manage or monitor, or their current team just doesn’t have the time to be effective.
Companies are Struggling to Keep up With Service Requests on Twitter
Most companies would love to locate and respond to their customers’ tweets, but they just aren’t monitoring or don’t have the tools in place .
Taking the time to respond to customer care issues costs just one sixth the cost of a call center interaction, while generating higher levels of customer satisfaction. However, as you saw from the image above, Twitter data shows that just nearly 40% of customer tweets never get a response from the company.
So, how can you act quick and capitalize? Companies need to develop processes and utilize advanced tools for analytics, keyword tracking, and social media management. It’s found that 72% of people who complain on social media expect a response within an hour. Even brands with a team of 50 have trouble keeping up with not only the volume, but the quickness that’s expected in a response.
Brands of all size and popularity will benefit from social response processes, advanced tools, and of course, people to take manage the process.
If you don’t have the team in place currently, Bad Rhino’s social media management services will help. We’ll help you identify the right process and advanced tools for your brand to respond quickly to customers on social media.
Contact us today to talk about Customer Service on Social Media.
