In our technologically savvy world, your customers can communicate with your brand at all hours of the day through social media channels. Your customer is now only a tap of a button away from interacting with your brand, whether good or bad, and what you might not know is how fast a customer expects to hear back from you.
According to Search Engine Watch, 70% of Twitter users expect a response from brands they reach out to and 53% want a response in less than an hour. That number jumps to 72% when they’re issuing a complaint.
Stay Active
Keeping up with social media in real-time can become a daunting task if your brand is not actively monitoring your pages. But constantly monitoring your social media pages is crucial to building relationships with your customers. Your competitors are just a quick online search away if your customers do not receive feedback within a short time frame.
Social Media Engagement
Only one in four businesses report feeling confident in their social media engagement plan. Social media engagement is not just a one-time interaction with a customer, but an open line of communication over a period of time. Social media engagement is all about how your brand uses networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to create a great customer experience. As soon as your customer decides to engage with your brand over social media, they put their trust into your brand to solve their problem.
The Struggle is Real
Many brands struggle with social media real-time engagement because it can be overwhelming to keep up with the influx of messages and comments. For 51% of brands, real-time engagement on social media is their biggest challenge. In 2015, seven in eight social media messages to a brand went unanswered within 72 hours. These numbers are staggering. If your brand is unresponsive to a customer, you risk losing that customer. Use social media monitoring software, such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite, to stay on top of mentions and posts from your customers, or hire a firm to take the online customer service off of your hands.
Stay Relevant
Your brand must focus on staying relevant in the eyes of your customers. The greatest marketing message delivered at the wrong time is still a bad marketing message. If you catch your customer in a buying moment or a considering moment, you have more of a chance to get them to buy from your brand if you give them the right information at the right time. Reaching out to a customer when they have a specific question or comment can increase brand loyalty and possibly spark the chance of a future purchase.
Delivering real-time and personalized communication at the right time is essential if you want customers to come back to your brand. With the right real-time engagement plan, it is possible to fulfill all your customer’s expectations and even turn a negative experience into a positive one.
