Social media customer care is so big that brands need social media accounts to take care of and fulfill the support needs of their customers.

The more you are active on social media — giving out a positive image to your customers and possible consumers — the greater the influence you can gain in the market. According to Social Media Today, “customers spend 20-40 percent more with companies that engage and respond to customers via social media.” This means that your sales would surge up when you interact with them efficiently.

Moreover, people love social media. They also love feeling important. When your brand attends to their inquiries, it would make them feel good. Social Media Today also stated that “1 in 3 social media users prefer social media customer care services over telephone or email.”

When you have a great customer service team focused on social media, it would look good on your part. A statistic provided by Social Media Today said almost 70 percent of customers have gone to Twitter and Facebook regarding their issues and problems with their products and services bought from certain brands. To further prove that, another survey provided that more than 65 percent of consumers have already used social media to solve their customer service problems at least once in their life.

 

Empowering Customers Empower Your Brand On Social Media

According to a journal titled Customer Empowerment in the Digital Age, “consumers no longer accept the role of passive recipients of marketing communication. This is turning traditional communication approaches upside down and forcing brands to interact with individual customers quickly, openly, and continuously.”

Since customers can see through the lies and deception of brands, they are not afraid to speak up on social media about it. One quick search on the internet and Google would give them the answer to a question. Whether the question is related to their products and services, or if they want to know something about a certain brand, it is all on the internet. This is good for brands that are clean and honest as they can maximize the engagement and the willingness of the consumers to interact with them.

For example, according to the European Business Review, Instagram is the only social media platform that all brands in the fashion industry use. It is the perfect gateway to show their products and services because it focuses on images and simple captions so they go there and do it.

In exchange, people also post their own content that is related to the brand they like. They post pictures of them wearing different fashion brands — shoes, clothes, dresses, or jewelry — it is all on Instagram.

 

How To Respond To Customer On Social Media

To prove how social media customer care can help you grow and expand, see the statistics below.

For customer retention – 92 percent of customers stay loyal to a brand when they experience positive customer service on social media.

For an increase in revenue – 81 percent of brands have an annual increase in their sales and revenue due to referrals and word-of-mouth or a simple retweet and share on social media accounts. It resulted in a 30.7 percent ROI.

In Twitter – they say that a picture is worth a thousand words but in the social media channel, it is “a tweet can be as worthy as millions of dollars of advertisement.” An airline company has stated in their website that it helped them get a three-percent increase in revenue per transaction and that one tweet was just worth $8.98.

Meanwhile, a Telco that has answered a tweet worth $8.35 has seen a 10-percent increase in their revenue per transaction. In addition, a famous pizza chain has had a 20-percent increase in its revenue per transaction; that’s how powerful social media customer care is.

Furthermore, not only the people you interact directly will be positively affected by your social media customer service. NM Incite reported that “71 percent of consumers who experience positive social customer care are likely to recommend the brand to others, compared with just 19% of customers who do not get a response.”

 

Ignoring People On Social Media Will Cost You

On the other hand, how brands should not respond on social media is another story. Remember when the youngest Jenner tweeted about Snapchat, well, according to Vogue that resulted in a $1.5 billion loss for the company. It was the beginning of a “movement” where other celebrities stopped using it, then other regular people stopped to a little short after the incident.

Another example by Snapchat is their “Would You Rather” game that ended everything for them. It asked a very insensitive question in relation to Rihanna and Chris Brown incident back in 2009 and that resulted in a $650 million loss.

Moreover, Gartner has found out that when brands do not respond on social media, it can result in a 15-percent customer churn rate. Also, when they don’t answer to a direct message regarding a complaint, there is a 50-percent decrease in customer advocacy.

Just like what happened to Matt Beckwith who was an avid Chick-Fil-A eater. He was upset when the brand did not answer their hotlines after he called them. Also, they did not respond to his queries on their Facebook messenger nor on Twitter. In short, the social media customer care of the infamous restaurant failed to take care of this customer.

Not only that but 36 percent of people have used social media to shame and publicly condemn brands for not replying to them in time and for having poor social media customer care. This has been proven by a Sprout Social survey where 31 percent of people who have poor customer service experience online have posted about it one way or another.

 

What Not To Do On Social Media

There are many things that the marketing team and the customer service team should not do and even think about doing when conducting online interaction. Though taking a stand in relation to an issue is important, it is not always advised.

This has happened to many social media accounts of brands all over the world. One famous incident was when McDonald’s posted something about the U.S. president. Though there are people who liked it, it still impacted them negatively as other people (the ones that support the president) felt it was unnecessary. They also tweeted back that they will not eat at the fast-food chain from then on.

Another infamous account is Wendy’s Twitter account. The sassy handler of the social media account has gotten into “fights” with customers but many still liked them. However, there was an incident back three to four years ago and it was seen as ‘distasteful’ for many because many people considered it as racist.

Other things like being racist, riding on an event or disasters is not a very smart thing to do. Offensive jokes are also a no-no. Always checking spelling and hashtags are also very important.

It is hard to manage a social media account even though you are only a small business. It is better to let a social media customer care service expert to handle your online assets! Contact us now!