Web Marketing Strategy Update

Social media opens up a whole new channel for businesses to respond to customer feedback. Even though the feedback doesn’t come through traditional written or verbal channels, it is important to take prompt action on feedback when it is received. Further, feedback provided via social media, unlike traditional channels, often has a far greater audience than just than just the author. This fact alone underscores the importance of taking the right kind of action.

Today I’m going to outline three of the most common mistakes you should avoid when responding to customer feedback via social media.

Not Responding At All

Running a business is time consuming and it can be easy to overlook comments on social media if you don’t have tools in place to properly monitor it. However, not responding to feedback, positive or negative, isn’t acceptable on any social media platform. Further, the response timeframe on social media is accelerated. You need a way to check social media every few hours and respond immediately.

Dashboards, such as the one on Hootsuite, can be especially helpful to quickly identify who has mentioned your business or sent a message. Further, it is easy to set up multiple team members on Hootsuite so the duty to check and respond to messages can rest with more than one person.

Suggesting The Individual Reach Out Through Another Channel

Although there will definitely be times when you want to take a question or comment received from a customer via social media to another more private channel, it is usually most appropriate to provide some type of response in the public forum in which the customer initiated the first contact.

Because although you may satisfy any concerns the original customer has through an “offline” interaction, others in the social media realm may have similar questions, and how you respond publicly may positively or negatively impact another customer.

Therefore it’s important to provide enough background around how you dealt with the issue and perhaps how others should raise a similar question or issue if they have it as well. So much of what occurs on social media is perception, so you want to ensure your business is demonstrating its service orientation, especially on the social media stage.

Not Truly Addressing The Questions Raised

Finally, it’s important you ensure you actually respond to the question raised and don’t simply dance around the issue. The customer raising the issue as well as others on that social media platform who read the feedback recognize the question wasn’t truly addressed. And, if the question hasn’t been addressed, it’s the same as not answering it, right?

Your current and potential customers will ultimately value your honesty about any mistakes or issues, so it’s usually best to own up to any problems. You can even win some loyalty from how you respond to an apparently negative issue.

For more information on the subject, refer to 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Customers on Social Media by A Hansen Lieu on SocialMediaToday.

Author Chris Marentis is an expert in the field of local business internet marketing. Through his internet marketing firm Surefire Social Chris leverages website development, SEO and social media marketing to generate leads and boost local businesses through the web.

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