Social Media for Customer Service Purposes

1.Create a detailed customer service plan

Before you start with this procedure, you need to create a solid plan. One of the first things that you should do at this stage is to choose a Social Media strategy and stick to it. Find the ways in which you can use Social Media to help your business and how you will interact with your current and prospective clients.

Furthermore, you will have to find suitable tools in order to communicate with your customers. Using tools is a must for big companies. You may have to approve certain comments before they are published and share some feedback with your customers. It is also a good idea to develop a crisis plan in order to respond to situations in which your company’s name is at risk. For example, if you own a market and someone complains about buying a product that has expired and shares this information on the Internet, then you will have to respond as quickly as possible before this post becomes viral.

2. Make sure that your staff is trained well and that their knowledge is upgraded regularly

The people who are part of your customer service team must have great knowledge in social media, but they also need to follow the latest trends in this field. Social Media platforms are changing their rules and concepts frequently and you must implement these changes fast. It is probably a good idea to train your staff about the responses they need to provide on FAQ.

You should also assign a more experienced employee to handle more complex questions.
Of course, your staff should know that they should never be involved in disagreements with customers.

social media for customer service purpose

3. Listen to your customer’s complaints and solve the problems

One of the worst things that you can see on your Social Media profile is a negative review or comment. It will take a lot of positive comments to “hide” one negative comment. But, instead of focusing on getting positive comments try to fix the problem that caused that one negative comment. In other words, listen to your customers and their needs and desires. It is a good idea to contact the user privately and resolve the issue. If the comment is very serious, you need to check your products and services right away.

4. Encourage your customers to leave feedback

Use some other sources and channels that you usually use to contact customers like emails and call centers and ask your clients to leave feedback on your Social Media profiles. Leaving a comment on Facebook or Twitter or even leaving online reviews on your website is an excellent way to improve your image.

As you can see managing customer service on social platforms is a complex task, but with a proper plan and a good team you can manage this process without any hassles.

“It’s fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well”.
-Ethan Zuckerman-


Social Shares on Social Media. How to increase them?

Social Media is posting interesting content. Then, people will start to follow you even if they have never heard about you. When you have people sharing your Facebook or Twitter content, you are getting their friends and followers to listen to what you have to say.
You have to work towards getting people interested in your content. There are a few ways to make this happen, and none of them are particularly difficult. As long as you put some time and energy into this, you can see great results.
High quality content is one of the best ways to get more shares on Social Media. If your content is not good, people are not going to want to share it. This means that you will not attract nearly as much attention as you would like to. Before doing anything else, focus on putting out high quality content that people will actually want to read. Leave an open question in the end of each blog or content shared, so you can have feedback about what people want to know. Next, keep the information fluent and post related subjects where people can continue to find answers. With so much sharing going on throughout Social Media, you want to make sure that you do this. People always have an alternative, and you do not want them leaving your page to find your competition. Blogs are useful as content. Nowadays people read blogs to be updated and to get feedbacks of services and products.

You want your content to look good on Social Media! Then your Social Shares will grow.

Good content alone is great, but it will not do anything if your content does not look good when shared. The image, title, and description that people see should encourage them to look further. Use a interesting title as a hook. It should grab their interest and make them want to know more. Optimize everything to get Social Shares so that people like what they see. This is a first impression of your content. Make it a good one to keep people coming back. I guarantee you that your social media will increase.
Visuals are another great way to engage people to share your information on Social Media outlets. Using videos and images are a must. A short video is a good way to connect with your audience. Furthermore, an image can say more than one thousand words. You can use an image or a set of images.
Social media is not that hard to understand, but some people forget different features or do not bother looking for it. If you want as many shares as possible, make sharing visible and appealing. Have sharing links for Social Media that allow people to post the content with minimal difficulty, and without having to hesitate or think twice about it.

If you have any questions, please write them in the comment area.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.”

Social Media plays a big role in Marketing today.
Business and companies are putting their efforts into reaching out people to build in order to increase their audience. As we know, these companies are busy getting their brand out there. Therefore many times they forget about the big asset they have, their employees.
Social Media has been misunderstood for many businesses that believe Social Media has been designed to serve a brand. On the contrary, Social Media is a bridge to communicate people not a brand. That’s why is important to turn your employees into your Social Media advocates. Nobody is better than company employees to get the brand out there. We can take as an example A
Dell where their employees use their social media accounts to updates information about the company.

“58% of certified employees engage in Social Media post every week on behalf of DELL”.

“Employees share 6 times more DELL updates on their Social Media outlets than on company accounts”Jay Baer said.
Individual posts made on personal accounts have more impact on people than post made on company account.
According to Nielsen “ 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising”. Vs. “ 47% of people trust advertisement from companies”
We can see, that your employees are big asset for your Social Media efforts. Your employees have families and friends and these families and friends have families and friends too and all of them have social media outlets. That is a word of mouth in the Internet that carry trust and confidence.

According to the survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project “ 71% of internet users adults in USA are on Facebook while 18% of Internet users adults in USA are on twitter”
“Average Facebook user has 338 friends and average twitter user has 208 followers”
Companies can’t waste the opportunity to turn their employees into brand ambassadors. Now you wonder how I can make my employees feel confident about sharing company information on their personal accounts.
Well, first it is important to create a Social Media Guideline that includes points like:

    1. You are responsible for what post,/li>
    2. You have to state that you work for the company
    3. Identify on your Social Media Account by your name and position on the company
    4. Respect the audience
    5. Respect copyright and logo of the company.
    6. And other similar things that are common sense.

Having a guideline and providing training is a good starting point to engage your employees to participate on Social Media as your brand ambassador. Hire a coach to motivate your employees so that they involved and participate actively on Social Media talking about the brand. You can also give away some small things as awards. In addition, you can create a contest inside the company to decide who is the employee that publishes the most information about the company on her or his personal Social Media accounts. Organize events for employees like a picnic day at the park and tell them to publish pictures of the event on their Instagram accounts. It will be fun, and this will create awareness of your brand. Use metrics to see results and share with everybody the information. Don’t keep it just for the manager. Make your employees feel as an important part of the company because they are.
According Edelman, 2013. “41% of people believe employees are trustworthy than a company’s CEO or PR department”.
This shows us that employees posting will engage people and earn trust for the brand they are talking about.

I know you are thinking, well it sounds great, but I have a small company and I have a few employees. Use the same pattern for your company. Start with your employees by making them feel happy to work for your brand then they will become passionate about it, and will be natural for them to talk great things about the brand. Let me know how things are going for you in this new project!
“You can’t be the best place to buy if you are not the best place to work”

Fake Followers in Social Media can hurt you
Fake and Ghost followers can spam your real followers, reduce your engagement and also you can lose your accounts. Many of us have fake followers in Twitter and Instagram, maybe you are following some fake and you don’t know it yet.
I will explain in details how to get rid of the fakes from your Social Media, and I will update you about few tools that will help you with this project.

Now we count with several tools to identify fake followers from our social media. These are the most useful for me: Fakers App, Fakefollowers, and IGExorcist.

Faker App was developed to identify fake twitter accounts. Using Fakeres App you can find the fake accounts are invading your twitter account. This tool also offers you the opportunity to measure the fake followers of your competition. You have to click on Fakers App and authorize the app to access your twitter account. The results are fast and in few minutes you can see your report.
Visit the app for more info about services they offer.

Fake Followers is a free tool that you can find at SocialBakers. Fake Followers will take 100 of your followers and will compare them with a list of criteria.

When an account has 90 days without any activity or has sent lees than four tweets, it will fall in an inactive category.
This app is easy to use. Just write your twitter id or somebody else’s twitter id and get the report

In the example above we can see that the user @sanchezec has 4% suspicious or empty followers, 5% inactive and 91% good.

The report also shows you some of the empty account identity. Now, that you have identified the fake ones, you can block them from your twitter account.

IGExorcist allows you to check for fake and ghost accounts that follow you in Instagram. This works by checking
your actual followers and accounts you used to follow. It will take into consideration activity the last 10 months.

This is easy and fun to use since I did this with my account. In order to see your report, just go to IGExorcist website. Then you can be redirected to your Instagram, and click Request Rebuild Button, and you will get your report.

Remember IGExorcist takes into account 300 past days of no activity. Perhaps someone just started following you and has had any interaction yet. This account will be seen as inactive because the app doesn’t know when someone started to follow you.

Finally, before you click the delete button make sure you double check. You know there are a lot of real people that only have accounts to check other accounts status, get updates or their favorite brands. These accounts are no fake. They may be are inactive but still are real and it can be useful to keep these followers. Who know maybe one day one of these silence account holders will buy something from you!
Please let me know your thoughts. I am interested to know them.
“Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever”.

Facebook is an amazing platform.

Facebook provides marketers with demographics to show things like interest, communities, groups, hobbies, sports, income, etc. It also provides analytics and insights.
To write a blog with content that is desirable to share it is important to take in consideration the following:

1) In order to know what to write about would be like knowing what your audience on Facebook is craving for. Then, you can ask them in an easy way. Let’s say you sell cloths and accessories for women. Which you can ask something like:

Dear Followers,

  • What colors are trendy?
  • What accessories are trendy for Summer 2015?
  • What Shoes and handbags are in fashion for 2015?
  • Accessories for Summer 2014
  • What hats’ styles are hot for this winter?

When you give options to people, they will let you know what they want to know more about. Then you will have important feedback from your audience. Now, you are ready to write relevant content that your followers will share.
2) Another hint is to check Facebook insights and analytics to see what are the postings that have had more engagement in “likes” and “shares”.

3) Check your competitors content shared on Facebook. Look at the amount of shares and likes since this will give you information about what is the public in Facebook craving.

4) Create an album for your pictures in Facebook. You can post these pictures in the news feed and wait to see the reaction that gives your the audience. Today, visuals like pictures and videos are favorites of the audience. The picture’s content will give you another important hint to talk about in your blogs.
It is also helpful to have the pictures in your album on Facebook so that you can grab the pictures any time you need for your blogs.

I am sure you will succeed with these tips and your engagements will grow, through “likes” and “shares”.
Please let me know if you have any question. I will be happy to help you.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected”.