By now, you should be figuring out how to up your social customer support game, if you haven't already.
But with so many different social media channels, mentions of your brand can come from anywhere. If you're an established brand, you'll also be receiving a couple more messages than you can handle at a time.
How do you keep up? How do you prioritize? How do you know if you're doing a good job or not?
We just might have the perfect solution - here are five ways you can utilize social media monitoring to help you provide awesome support on social.
1. Omnichannel monitoring
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, Instagram... there are dozens of social media platforms, and to some degree, your customers are likely active within all of them.
How many tabs do you need to have open to check every single one of these messages? And what about when your customers don't @mention your handle?
Having a monitoring tool enables you to pull in mentions from all platforms in one app, so that you can:
- Receive all notifications from one place
- Get alerted even when people don't tag or @mention you
- Respond and engage directly from the app
- Discover new channels where people are talking about you
The best thing about using a monitoring tool is that you don't have to go look for these messages - they're brought to you with no fuss.
Through the use of a monitoring tool, you might also be surprised to see how many people are talking about you on Reddit or a platform you never even considered looking into.
2. Real-time data
We know that angry and frustrated people are impatient - I know I'm super impatient when I'm angry at a brand. When something goes wrong, I want it fixed, and I want it fixed now.
According to a study by Convince and convert, 42% of customers who complain on social media expect a response within 60 minutes.
In order to respond in line with such expectations, you first need to know when your customers are talking about problems.
For example, our customers will tweet us when they have trouble. We can easily find the tweets, send them to the appropriate team member, and reply with help ASAP:
3. Filtering and prioritizing
Ideally, you should respond to every single customer who reaches out to you.
Of course, that's easy when you have five mentions a day, but most brands get more than that. If you're a big brand or are caught up in a crazy product launch or crisis, you're going to get a lot more than that.
That's when you wish you could have a magic wand to arrange all your mentions and show you the most important and urgent ones first.
Guess what? A good social media monitoring tool offers just that. In Mention, for example, we've included filters to sort your mentions by date, influencer score, platforms, sentiment, languages, and more.
If you're running tight on time, we suggest using filters in the following ways:
- Make sure you don't miss mentions from big influencers by setting a minimum influencer score (say 50 or above)
- Choose to display only negative mentions, because angry customers are less patient
- Select social media channels to narrow down the number of mentions, since customers are more likely to reach out (and expect a reply) on social than on news, blogs, or forums
4. Crises prevention and management
No brand wants to find themselves in a social media crisis - but every brand needs to be prepared for it.
During a crisis, there are going to be a lot of people reaching out directly on social media, and even more having conversations about you with other people.
You'll need to find everything being said, jump into conversations going off-track, and answer questions from your audience.
Monitoring makes it way easier to find conversations on multiple channels, whether you're tagged or linked to or not. With some tools, you can also engage and manage the crisis from your monitoring dashboard.
5. Analytics and reporting
Other than troubleshooting and answering to a customer's question quickly, you need to take a step back to look at the bigger picture from time to time.
That includes looking at things like:
- Overall brand sentiment - Are customers generally talking positively about your brand? Look out for sudden dips and peaks and figure out why
- Sentiment of a specific time period - How are customers reacting to your new product launch or the latest PR crisis? Learn from the experience to prepare for the next event.
- Geographic and platform distribution - Where (both virtually and physically) are people talking about you? Are you investing enough in customer support and brand advocacy there?
- Top influencers - Who are the big guns that are booing or raving about your brand? Identify them and handle them with extra care
With a monitoring tool like Mention, you can access these data in a few clicks, and export them easily to send to your boss, team, or client.
Take it one step further
To make the most of monitoring, don't just use it as a customer support tool, but a 'customer happiness' tool. Instead of just troubleshooting and answering queries, reach out when customers are just casually mentioning your brand - even when they don't expect you to reply.
Encourage your customers to talk to you online. Let them know you care about their opinions, and that their voices are heard.
Realistically, as brands become more reactive to customers' opinions, you'll be left behind if you don't have a monitoring system in place.