What is social media customer care?

Social media customer care is a brand’s specialized way of supporting, managing, and retaining potential and returning customers across social media platforms. The social media platforms you work through depend on your brand and where your target consumers are located. Often, this means responding to direct messages (DMs), comments, requests, and complaints on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, and more.

Customer care is often conducted at a call or service center, through a brand-managed support team, or outsourced to a third-party digital marketing agency. Brands also opt to hire their own social media manager to oversee the entire operation.

According to Statista, there are 5.07 billion social media users across the globe. In the United States alone, there are 239 million. As a business, you can’t let all those customers fly by without a meaningful connection. In fact, our survey uncovered that 43% of customers are more likely to purchase after a good customer care experience, and 83% stated that good customer care was their most important factor when deciding what product or service to buy. 

As a result, exceptional customer care on social media can improve sales. We found that 68% of surveyed consumers will spend more money with a brand that demonstrates understanding them on an individual and personal level. And, your social media care team can prompt more return customers. According to our survey, 83% of customers report feeling increased loyalty towards companies who respond and resolve their issues. Therefore, providing high-quality and thorough social media care for customers is not only important, but it is also essential for your business to remain relevant online.

To build your brand’s social media customer care strategy, you’ll need to monitor and analyze data to inform your decisions. You’ll also need to envision and develop your brand’s tone and style.

A full audit of your current customer care social media practices will give you a clearer picture of where you need to improve, what platforms are most active, and what users want to see in your brand. All told, it will build the foundation of your strategy. To conduct a social media customer care audit:

• Identify and list all active social media platforms.

• Take stock of where the most engagement is occurring.

• Note what posts and what kinds of posts receive the highest amount of reactions.

• Note what pages or brands are attracting your target consumers the most.

• Look at highly successful brands within your business niche and follow their lead.

• Ensure that your branding is solid, with a professional logo and copy tone.

Khoros’ social media management software can provide insights across all of the platforms you have a presence. Beyond using it to manage social media content and care for your own brand, you can also utilize it to better understand competitor tactics. All of this information is displayed in a unified dashboard that’s easy to use and interpret.

Customer experiences can influence initial sales, recurring customers, and the overall reputation of your brand. To personalize and improve customer experience, focus on:

• Responding to posts on social media soon after they are made.

• Improving how your customer feels after a conversation or resolution.

• Sending out simple feedback surveys after certain engagements.

One way to personalize your customer’s experience is through unique copy. For instance, a brand that exemplifies a feeling of calm (perhaps a spa product or makeup brand) could enhance customer engagement by responding to DMs with copy that matches. They might say “Hey beautiful, we hear your day is less than peaceful! A member of our spa-trained team is on its way.” Whereas a high-adrenaline all-terrain vehicle tour company might respond with “We’re seeing your red flags!! We’ll get you rockin’ again momentarily.”

Customers expect consistency. They pay attention to the brand’s statements and sentiments on social media posts. If they don’t like what they see, they are less likely to purchase.

To ensure that your business is showcasing a consistent brand voice, train all members of your customer care team to follow the brand’s expectations. Although some social media networks warrant a different style of content (think of a post on LinkedIn vs. TikTok), it’s important to make sure social media profiles and messaging adhere to the correct brand voice.

Social listening is a process used by brands to understand consumers based on their posts, comments, and reactions across social media platforms. It’s important for brands to engage in this practice because it can uncover insights that will help you connect with and serve your audience. Beyond looking at how consumers perceive your brand, social media listening allows you to get a sense of how consumers view competitors including what people like and dislike about them. You can use these findings to alter your brand’s strategy in order to form stronger connections. To conduct social listening and monitoring with ease, take advantage of Khoros’ social media management solution that allows you to:

• Monitor what people and businesses say about you and competitors online.

• Read and analyze billions of conversations in a blink of an eye.

• Evaluate beyond text content to include images, videos, and audio.

Attempting all of this manually can take up a lot of time, and may even require a full-time hire. Thus, many brands opt for software instead.

Low-quality care on social media can have a highly negative impact. We found that 65% of consumers who had a bad customer care experience will switch to another brand entirely and 67% will share their stories with other potential buyers. And so, it is essential to deliver customer care at a level that remains consistent, helpful, and malleable to improvements and change. To learn from negative opinions about your brand on social media:

• Pay attention to complaints.

• Analyze how adjusting your current strategies might affect your company as a whole.

• Apply changes that will benefit your company throughout, while also improving relationships.

Respond to customer complaints in a timely, respectful, and solution-based manner. Move negative commentary to a private conversation if possible, and find a solution together. Social listening can catch this negative feedback and allow you a chance to intervene. Furthermore, you should look for ways to learn from the negative feedback such as implementing changes to prevent future customers from having the same issues.

In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) is another essential component of an effective social customer care strategy. With contact center automation, you can answer queries, analyze sentiment, speed and manage post publishing, and more. AI can quickly analyze customer sentiment in messages, so you can provide a personalized response with the right tone when providing support. In fact, AI can even provide suggested responses to help your agents deliver faster and better care. Additionally, the same sentiment analysis functionality allows AI to quickly find and respond to negative posts and comments before they have a chance to go viral on social media. 

The AI world is complicated, but you won’t have to go through it alone. You can access a full suite of AI services for social media and other channels through Khoros, from easy chatbot support and no-code customization to full product integration.

A social media customer care platform will take over your strategy, freeing up time, energy, and money that can be spent elsewhere within your company. Tailored and easy-to-read analytics, dedicated agent desktops, and platform training are also essential. Khoros’ digital contact center can do all of this and more. It allows your business the capability to care for customers across multiple social media networks, from Facebook to Pinterest and more. Since this is an omnichannel strategy, your customers will also be able to switch between platforms with ease according to their preferences or situations. This improves your relationship with them by proving that you’re flexible and reliable. And, it can encourage users to remain engaged and interested, rather than losing them between platforms.

Of course, there are other areas of social media customer care to consider. After all, this is an ever-changing area that will continuously develop as consumers have new needs. It’s also important to:

• Continuously monitor and analyze your social media care effectiveness. If your customers are not returning due to poor experiences, it’s time to adjust your communication strategies.

• Implement an escalation management strategy that outlines the exact steps to be followed in certain situations, from a bad review to an unhappy consumer with a broken product. Your brand may choose to move these conversations to DMs or connect the user to your customer service team via email. By taking the conversation out of the public eye, you lessen the risk of a bad reputation growing. This is especially effective if an issue deals with sensitive information. And, you can offer fast, individualized solutions like delivering a user-specific discount code.
  

For more ideas for further development, download our Digital Customer Care Playbook.

T-Mobile offers some of the best in customer care. For example, a recent post in Instagram reels prompted a returning customer to reach out for answers on how to update their address after placing an order. T-Mobile was able to respond within the day, giving the user the answer they needed before a problem even started:

Fitbit is another company that regularly showcases excellent care. In this example, a Fitbit user who misses the weight widget feature on their workout watch reached out on an Instagram post. What could have blown up into a viral negative conversation about a feature that got removed was instead addressed promptly through a sound escalation management strategy. Fitbit responded in a timely manner and moved the conversation to private DMs, where they could deliver personalized care to the commenter.

Customer care teams can only manage so much of the customer care process. With Khoros, you won’t need as many team members on hand. Instead, you’ll have a world-class digital engagement tool to help with handling communications, de-escalating bad situations, and more.

With our customer care software, your social media managers will enjoy the full powerhouse of AI-driven features and workflows. Sentiment analysis and recommended responses can help agents deliver better responses for support requests, and omnichannel capabilities make it easy for agents and customers to seamlessly move their conversation to suit the situation or customer preferences. 

Request a Khoros demo today, and take your social media customer care to the next level.