Social Media Response Strategy- Why You Need One
Receiving feedback from your audience is a double-edged sword. On one hand, your audience is interacting with you and encouraging conversation. On the other hand, what they post is public. To help you navigate this feedback, it helps to have a social media response strategy. If you haven’t created one yet, you could be missing out on opportunities to resolve issues, retain customers and build loyalty.
Every business that is on social media should have a social media response strategy. Below are the main points to include for the best results.
Establish Social Media Guidelines
Employees should understand your brand identity and how to apply your voice to your social channels. Consistency is key when sharing information and responding to followers on social media. To help with this, establish clear guidelines on what posts to like, repost or reply to. This can take some time to pin down, so you’ll need to practice it and determine the best ways for your business to shine through.
Encourage Communication Between Departments
An established line of communication between departments should be another part of your social media response strategy. Your social media team probably can’t answer all of the questions customers have so other departments will have to chime in. Agree on a process that everyone can follow so you can keep your response times short while delivering relevant, accurate information.
Utilize a Social Media Management System
There are a number of management systems available to streamline your social media accounts. You can use this software to track engagement, sort mentions and so forth. Choose a system that will keep you organized so that comments don’t get overlooked or lost. These systems also allow you to schedule posts in advance to save time.
Create Automatic Replies
Crafting unique responses to every comment sounds nice in theory, but it’s timely to do so. For some businesses, it makes sense to create a standard set of replies that can be easily pulled from when commenting on feedback. Your team can approve them or send the reply instantly. Keep in mind that the response should sound like they came from a real person and not a robot.
Plan for Negative Feedback
It’s inevitable. If you’re on social media, you’re eventually going to get some type of criticism. But don’t let this scare you away. If you’re doing things right, you’ll have far more happy customers than mad ones. That said, you must have a strategy for dealing with negative feedback so that it doesn’t hurt your brand. Our best advice: be apologetic and empathetic and try to move the conversation to a more private channel where you can discuss a solution.
Monitor Brand Mentions
Lastly, make sure you or your management system is tracking tagged and untagged brand mentions. Keeping an eye on this information helps you find more opportunities to connect with your audience and reach new customers.
Planning a social media response strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. By following the tips above, you can create a response plan for dealing with feedback on social media. To create a social media response strategy of your own, contact WSI Star Web Solutions today.