How to Integrate Social Media into Your CX Strategy
As of 2020, Facebook had approximately 1.7 billion users, while Instagram boasted of 500+ million daily active users globally. In other words, if you want to be where your customers are, a robust social media presence is essential. In fact, research conducted last year found that 68% of businesses believe social media will become more important to CX processes in the next five years.
Integrating social media with your CX strategy requires more than having an active Facebook page or responding to DMs on social media. It implies a holistic framework for customer outreach and engagement, centred around the 60+ social channels out there and selecting the best fit for your customer base.
This has four components:
Social media listening – Special media listening lets you capture customer insights from information publicly shared on social media platforms. You can get unbiased, objective opinions on your brand as well as your competitors. You can identify product and thematic trends, along with influencer opportunities in each category. You can even monitor your ongoing sales and marketing campaigns to gauge audience response and reconfigure them accordingly
Social media marketing – This is the most common activity we associate with a social CX – i.e., using social media as an outbound platform for top-of-the-funnel marketing and brand awareness campaigns. It ensures that your brand is discoverable on social media and you maximise the outreach opportunities provided by these platforms
Social media reputation management – Customers commenting or leaving a review on social media may not have an actionable grievance, but this doesn’t mean that organisations can ignore the communication. A big part of social-centric CX is acknowledging feedback wherever it is shared, and this includes reviews on your Google business listing, Yelp reviews, industry listing review pages, and, of course, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Social media engagement – You can engage with customers directly on social media and solve queries before they can escalate. Social-centric CX technology lets you create conversation queues, automatically categorising and prioritising DMs, comments, and @ mentions based on the business rules you set. In a way, social media is an additional channel necessity for contact centres
These are the four major ways in which you can integrate social media into your customer experience strategy. Listening is a passive activity, meant to capture insights. Marketing is active outbound, enriching the CX through campaigns, sales promos, and driving the product’s value proposition. Reputation management and engagement maintain the quality of CX you are delivering at a consistent level across social media platforms.
Apart from this, once you have an established presence, you can leverage social media analytics to fine-tune the content aspect of CX. Social analytics can reveal exactly which type of content your audience wants, when, and on what channel.
Together, these five tactics can help you maximise the potential of social media as you pursue CX excellence and cater to the next generation of digitally-native (not just digital-savvy) customers.
Source: CX Today
