Leveraging Social Media For Customer Engagement
Social media can be a primary channel for customer care as it can create an end-to-end experience. Earning customer loyalty has raised the bar for brands to compete for optimizing the business avenues. Moreover, it makes sense if social media is treated as a customer channel – not just for marketing and customer profiling.
Engaging with customers on Social media platforms helps you grow and nurture your relationships with customers in every sense.
Importance Of Social Media For Business
Increased brand awareness is driving leads, and that is sufficed by around 37% of consumers who voted for social media as the most remarkable source of inspiration for their purchases.
Social media has been bullish in asserting itself as a medium for growing and nurturing your relationships with customers. Turning your social media presence into a two way customer engagement channel as against a one-way marketing and customer profiling avenue, allows you to engage with customers to address their concerns to show that you genuinely care about their business.
The application of social media analytics, which is basically quantifiable data, provides valuable insight into your followers’ behavior and how they engage with your content.
Breaking The Barriers
Relying solely on online presence through your website for businesses might lack the effectiveness of social media channels that can help you reach the audience you’ve yet to have contact with or even identify as potential leads.
Again, social media at scale involves moving beyond direct messages and owned mentions that make up a very little percentage of the actual mentions from people who fully expect a company to respond.
So, identifying and engaging the earned social media mentions is the way to go since they are usually greater in volume compared to the owned mentions.
Driving The Customer Engagement
On average, users spend 144 minutes a day on social media.
Filtering, both owned and earned interactions can help in routing addressable content for the job. This allows you to handle and manage more volume, and respond to customer service issues cost-effectively by avoiding a customer service call.
The timeliness in getting the right answer fast for customer queries becomes easier. By integration of social media channels to the ERP, Frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be resolved online in a jiffy. And social media can scale more rapidly than traditional customer service methods during seasonal peaks.
Organizations must decide what content will be most impactful for the primary response and then design the process around those goals. It’s also crucial to have the right technology platform that is agile enough to change that priority level, either long-term or temporarily.
Identifying The Right Insight
Insights decide your business success and hence it is of utmost importance to listen directly to the customer. This learning helps in predicting what they like and divert your focus on what needs to be improved.
The insights derived from this strategy give a clear understanding of your gathered data in order to make adjustments in real-time for maximum impact. Right insights decode what the major trends or issues are and make your strategies well-defined to deal with them.
Making The Business Case
The cost factor is always more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. 50% of customers purchase more from companies that they believe provide outstanding customer service. Customer experience plays a role in driving loyalty, affinity, and supporting retention.
As a consumer-preferred customer care channel, social media executed well can deliver real results for a business whether it is cost savings, efficiencies, revenue growth, higher individual spending, and referrals.
59% of global social media users favour the brands that respond to customer service questions on social media. Marketers who succeed at responding on social media effectively and at scale will likely be the champions in customer experience — driving affinity and loyalty that translates into real business value.
Bottom Line
Whether you’re hoping to expand your customer support channels or make use of influencer marketing, there are more than one ways to leverage social media to meet your overall business goals. Hence building platform-specific marketing strategies will help your business reap the benefits of using social media in the longer run.For more information click here