Social Media
What almost everyone on this planet has, as of today is social media. People have an account in at least one of the social media platforms. It’s become a new source of entertainment. While a few uses it for leisure and distraction, others live on social media platforms. They make money through social media and have made use of this powerful application to the best of their ability to earn through it.
Most people who like exploring new things and do not want to get succumbed to a routine Work-Life generally use a different path. Of them, most people choose to do something online as it can be done at the comfort of their place, staying home.
Social media is a vast ocean and has an abundance of opportunities. Making the most of it is an intelligent person’s game. Businesses that use social media and social media experts to manage it as a tool see definitive results in a short period. Earlier there was a decidedly less competition online. But now, with growing trends all over the world, every business sees the need to have a social media presence to expand their brand.
What Is Customer Experience on Social Media?
Millions of people, hundreds of countries and millions and billions of choices – but what connects them all is one powerful tool – Social Media. Gone are the days when people had televisions and landline phones at home. Now is the digital era. Every home has smart appliances and modern technology. It’s a cakewalk to get things done from where you are. With these innovations grew people’s demands for something to make them more productive and efficient. Companies are working hard to stand ahead of the competition by making customer experience much better and proficient. Social Media experts are working tirelessly as well to simplify and breakdown the complexity in understanding customer needs and behaviour.
Customers have become more demanding, and their wants are ever-growing. Customers look up to their favourite brands to fulfil their needs. Understanding them and their tastes are the only way to grow up the ladder. For this, businesses have started using various tools and methods to know their customers. Knowing their best interests have become a necessity today for the industries to produce accordingly to ensure maximum benefits. Businesses are also in search of smart methods to get the most of what customers think about their products and brand. This especially is very important to understand the brand loyalty and brand value.
How to Boost Customer Experience Management in Social Media?
Social media and customer experience are interrelated. Social media is the most powerful tool that customers have. There are many ways to govern their feedback or experience and the impression they have on a brand thru social media. Some of them are:
Multi-Channel customer experience – When a brand uses multiple channels like media, web, email and so on to engage their customers on social media, it is called an omnichannel or multichannel tracking. It is important as not all customers can be reached through a single channel. While some are active through emails, others show their strong presence on a social media platform.
Engaging Content – To boost your customer engagement you need to understand them well. You need to know what excites them and what makes them bend towards your brand. Experiment with multiple types of content and engaging campaigns. Be creative and think out of the box.
Statistics – The best way to know the performance of your brand is by looking at the numbers. Numbers in social media are very significant for they give a numeric state of your brand’s level on the platform.
You can collate information on the number of positive and negative feedback, the number of times someone has approached you or have connected through a call-to-action button and so on. Collecting such data will help you analyze better.
Many social media platforms have predefined parameters that get updated as and when there’s online activity going on. This makes it easier for the users to understand where their brand stands and how far they have to go until they reach their target customers.
Invest well in Customer Experience – Customers tend to come your way when you make them feel valued. They need to know that their concerns are heard of and are tended to and also that they are important to you. Unless they are made to feel worthy of, they will not build a strong bond of trust with the brand. So, investing in giving a better customer experience is more of an income-generating factor than an expense as a whole.
Online Reputation Management – Whether you know if or not, there are things about you on the internet that gives an impression of you to the viewers. Thanks to social media that has the ability to pull an age-old picture of yours too that you might have put 10 years back!
What goes on the internet from your end should be carefully scrutinized to make sure you don’t land in trouble, any time in the future. It is necessary to filter your online reputation once in a while to keep a balanced image of your brand.
Make this as one of the must-dos in your social media marketing plans. Making the right filter of your online presence is extremely important to keep up your online reputation because what you are on the internet is what customers think of you.
Frequently checking on your online reputation is essential as you never know what is put up against you on the internet there. The algorithm of google does not separate negative and positive content of your brand and so it is up to you to refine them on a regular basis. It is more like doing search engine optimization. The only difference is that in SEO you optimize for your webpage to rank on the top while in ORM you work to filter and rank your ‘better content’.
Importance of Updated and Right Content
There is so much information online and many people depend on it and believe what it has to say. SEO works in a way where those links get picked up the most that you have checked the previous time. This is where there is a need and a requirement to have an updated, right and engaging content. When you have bad content online, there can be malicious links coming up to your product or service and when customers see such links ranked on the top, they tend to proceed only to end up being disappointed for not having received the right information or the expected content from the brand.
This is noted by the search algorithm and when someone else too checks for a similar keyword the same information pops up. And this is how a vicious circle is formed and customers get looped in the same outdated link with disappointing content. Customers take this up on social media and the brand suffers trust issues.
On the other hand, when there’s quality and updated content and those links are generated and when customers time and again view it, there’s good feedback given by the customers on their social media pages and also help in promoting the products. And so, timely updation of content is extremely important for a better customer experience results on social media.
Reiterating ‘Customers’
With a growing demand for products and services, there’s always the need to know time and again on what customers think of various brands. After all, it is they who decide the market for a product. We live in a world filled with information. Information right or wrong can make or break a brand.
A brand insensitive to its customers is not likely to have a more extended market period in comparison to those who are very much paying attention to their customers. A brand means experience. Everyone has different experiences with brands. While one has great ones, others might not have it the same way. These get converted to positive and negative comments, respectively.
Feedbacks Rock the Industry
A good brand is one that has managed to create an impression in their customers’ minds. Social media engagement is extremely necessary for this. Buyers remember experiences from memories, and that keeps brands alive. This is another reason why brands like Boost or Amul still exist. They’ve managed to create impressions in the customers’ minds and so form a bond with them.
One of the classic examples for why customer experience on social media is essential can be understood better with Maggi’s story. There was a time when Nestle had almost tried all possible methods to re-brand Maggi after it faced allegations on the nutritional factors in it.
There were great posts on social media and hashtags trending everywhere to ban Maggi. This broke the brand altogether, and it took them a lot of time to recoup. On the other hand, the brand’s social media experts too became more customer-centric and relaunched its product successfully and now is again and once more, everyone’s favourite in the market.
This clearly shows that there is no particular customer experience guide in the market. It all depends on what you show about your brand and how you please your customers as each brand is different and unique.
The Effects Thru Social Media
Knowing customers’ experience is necessary because it is how a company exists in their minds. All great brands sell experiences, and once you form a good one with them, they are to remember you forever.
A study states that close to 71% of customers who are happy with a brand have gone to social media to promote it from their profiles or share about it among their friends. So one advantage of this is free publicity. While on the other hand, they have also spread reviews on the same if they did not get satisfied with the product or the service. This is a practice done to seek immediate assistance from the brands. This often ends up in creating a different image for it.
Constantly checking engagement levels through various social media engagement tools can help understand customer experience better. Robustly assess the set targeted parameters to handle any deviations. Understanding your customers, creating a customer journey map, developing a rapport and maintaining a connection with them leads to what we can call as the end result – the customer feedback and experience.
A practical building can be done when you put yourself in the customers’ shoes to know exactly how they feel.
What needs to be understood is that when you serve customers well and keep them in your good books your brand has value, and you get quickly promoted by them on social media which in fact gives you better visibility without any cost at all! On the other hand, customers also have the power to break a brand if they’re not satisfied with the product or services. A brand needs to be customer sensitive to track brand reputation.
With the fast pace of growing technology, it is important now than ever to maintain an excellent online relationship and presence. Social media is a potent tool, and customers are the key to it. To master your brand on social media is to succeed it on any other medium.
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