List of underrated tips to improve social media response time.
Social media channels continue to become platforms for sharing positive and negative customer experiences. People actively get into discussions, post comments, and share their respective views. No matter how quickly you think you respond to your customers online, there is always room for improvement.
While some users want a response within an hour, others keep the timeline to one business day. These expectations might seem ridiculous based on the daily volume of DMs, comments, and posts you notice. But customers are impatient and want immediate solutions.
How do you increase your current social media response time in such a rush?
Let’s dive straight into some tried and tested hacks to improve your social media response time.
For those of you who are new to social media response time as a term, read this guide.
Underrated hacks to improve your social media response time
While there are no set rules for how businesses should respond to their audience on social media, your response time does have a lot to say about you. So here are some underrated tips to improve your social media response time:
1. Invest in a social media intelligence tool
With the rise in social media, people continue to share their personal experiences with a product on different platforms. Based on these experiences, other users also give feedback or suggestions to improve.
It’s all fun and games with positive feedback until criticism walks in. The problem is you don’t know which social media platform a customer will use to share a bad experience. Some customers tweet, others comment on a random Instagram or Facebook post. Manually keeping up with these remains hectic and ineffective.
This is where the importance of a social media intelligence tool like Radarr comes in to present all social media conversations in a unified dashboard. The dashboard helps you keep up with campaign performance through detailed analytics to outrun the competition. It also shows all conversations online to turn them into valuable brand insights.
So whether it’s enhancing your online reputation or predicting upcoming trends, a social media response tool like Radarr is worth the investment. All you need to do is connect your social channels, and the tool pulls in every social media engagement, including likes, comments, shares, DMs, etc.
2. Set up auto-responses
Every business comes across many questions customers repeatedly ask. These common queries set a path to becoming a brand that responds instantly. Chat with your customer support team to identify these questions and their best possible responses.
The most common use cases include assuring customers you will handle their queries shortly, directing them to pages with further information, or providing a timeframe to set their expectations straight. Lastly, set up automated replies and wait to see your engagement rate rise.
But wait back! Sometimes your ideal customers will browse through your website to get an answer. Therefore, create a separate FAQ page to make the journey of these shy folks easier.
3. Keep a bunch of canned responses
Automated replies work fine until personalization walks through the door. That’s where a bunch of pre-built templates will help you reduce response time on social media. Your team can easily fill in the blanks and address queries quickly based on comments, DMs, etc. It’s a straightforward way to save time and deliver a consistent experience, keeping your brand’s tone of voice intact.
Here is an example of how Booho, an online fashion retailer, provides personalized responses to negative comments on multiple platforms.
The brand also has a separate Twitter account that tackles disappointed customers. Now even if they send out a bunch of canned responses, the team member inserts a name to let them know a human is actively handling their issue.
The critical takeaway is to have pre-built templates for various instances you actively personalize to cater to multiple customer needs.
3. Create a dedicated account for customer support
Let’s say your social media marketing team thrives at running engaging campaigns. But do they remain equally effective in handling troubled customers?
That’s one area your customer support executives will always handle better. After all, they deal with these queries throughout the day and in greater detail.
Due to this, many brands have started creating separate Twitter pages for customer support. Answering queries becomes easier as that’s the only reason customers visit that page. You wouldn’t find any other discussion except the areas they are struggling with.
Look at how the eCommerce giant Amazon uses AmazonHelp to provide quick customer support to users.
Filtering out support issues from your primary channel will strengthen your social media response strategy. But some customers will still reach out to you on your primary account. Divert these queries to your customer support team to reduce the overall social media response time.
4. Set clear business hours
Are you one of those businesses that are available for their customers 24/7?
If not, you need to set your customers’ expectations by letting them know when they can hear from you. It will help them stay patient instead of taking drastic measures like leaving negative comments.
Social media response tools like Radarr let you set up and display availability to respond to messages on social media platforms – this includes both days and times that your team is available.
5. Guide customers to your support channels
Disappointed customers often create havoc in the comment section of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts. They are often the ones tired of sending out emails.
How about quickly directing this negative energy to a safe space? Let your customers know the best way to reach out to you for a quick response – this could be on messages, email, live chat or social media.
For example, Lululemon has directly inserted a link in the Twitter bio to reassure and help customers reach them easily.
Remember to keep your customers from questioning the easiest way to communicate with you.
6. Learn to prioritize social media mentions
People might mention your brand on social media after they are happy with the purchase. You must thank them for their kind words and motivate them to purchase more. However, these aren’t the mentions that demand immediate attention.
Some disappointed customers out there are trying to get attention with social media mentions. While we might see brands responding within one business day, Playstation, one of the most renowned names in the gaming industry, fails to do so.
Twitter is filled with tweets claiming how easy it is to hack into a PlayStation account. Take a look at how some users even asked Elon Musk to investigate the matter.
PlayStation doesn’t actively try to resolve these queries, and multiple threads are talking about their poor customer service.
Learn from this example and make it a point to prioritize responding to negative social media mentions immediately. Remember that your potential customers are on social media browsing through these comments. They are quick to observe how efficient you are at handling these severe concerns.
When you use social media listening and monitoring tools like Radarr, you can also leverage the power of sentiment analysis. This helps you identify the intent and emotion behind online conversations that your audience is engaging in, helping you prioritize what to respond to.
7. Find conversations related to your brand online
Not every customer tags or mentions a brand while showing disappointment online. Yet, they are creating a negative image of your brand online.
That means it’s essential for brands to monitor customer conversations online and provide them with the necessary support. It’s not possible to manually find every conversation online or in time. Due to this, it becomes essential for brands to invest in a social media intelligence tool like Radarr that keeps you updated with real-time happenings across multiple social platforms.
You can instantly assist your dissatisfied customers and clear their confusion. Remember that customers don’t flinch at trusting a brand again if they are quick at resolving their complaints.
8. Use chatbots for quick responses
Chatbots are efficient at responding to customers, especially in the absence of reps at a particular time. Many companies use chatbots to respond to FAQs, direct them to the proper customer support channels, or connect with an agent. In short, chatbots save the time impatient customers spend waiting for an agent to address the query.
One of the most critical tasks of chatbots is ensuring the right leads communicate with the right reps. Here’s an example of how Roof AI, a chatbot for real-estate marketers, interacts with potential leads on social media in a friendly manner.
Instead of directly connecting leads with agents, it extracts information for personalized communication. So when reps finally interact with the leads, they are more likely to provide a thought-out solution.
9. Measure, optimize and improve
Brands often track many critical social media metrics while forgetting one of the most crucial ones in the mix—average response time. Knowing your current response time helps target the right areas to improve the same.
We recommend keeping track of the number of conversations triggered on each channel, how many you are able to respond to, the average turnaround time, number of positive and negative conversations, and the impact it all has on your brand’s share of voice.
Having a social media analytics tool like Radarr comes in handy here. It brings in all these key metrics onto one dashboard to make it simpler for businesses to optimize their processes for better response times and customer engagement.
Wrapping up
Begin by jotting down your current response time and the target you plan to achieve. Then focus on the strategies mentioned above and hacks to reduce your social media response time.
Get an all-in-one social media tool like Radarr to reduce the hassle of manual monitoring across multiple channels. It will give you real-time insights to enhance your campaigns and keep your customers happy.
