The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Customer Care

The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Customer Care

Over the last few years, social media has changed the world, and customer care is no exception.

The days when social platforms like Twitter and Facebook could only allow customers to submit reviews through mail or phone and customers would wonder if the problem would get a solution are long gone.

Counting 4.62 billion social media users, popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others establish an online forum for individuals to interact with your business. A growing number of users get in touch with brands and they expect to receive a solution within 24 hours via direct messages or comments.

Today, providing exceptional social media customer care is necessary for any successful social media manager. In this guide, you'll find why brands should bother about social media customer care as well as six tips on how to use social media profiles for customer support.

Why Bother About Providing Social Media Customer Care?

The popularity of social media platforms is high among popular and aspiring businesses, but just a few of them bother about providing their social media followers with social media customer care. Here are three reasons to implement social media customer care in your strategy:

  • Meet your customers' expectations: When people follow your business account on social media, this means that they want to interact with your company. They are more likely to use social media for customer support, too. What is more, social media clients expect a fast response from you.
  • Increase trust and loyalty: When you give customers what they want, they feel valued. The circumstance presents a one-of-a-kind chance for you to build brand loyalty and trust through social media. As a result, it leads to higher customer satisfaction, more referrals, and sales.
  • Stand out from the crowd: Not all brands that have a social media presence invest time and effort into providing customer care on social media platforms. When it takes days or weeks to hear back from your brand, people lose interest in it. On the other hand, when you provide social media customer care, not only do you give customers what they want, but you also stand out from the crowd of your competitors.

So, wouldn't it be great if you could provide social media customer care for your fans and potential customers? Keep on reading to find six actionable tips on how to do it the right way.

1. Identify a Dedicated Customer Support Channel

Do you have a social media presence on different social media platforms? That's great, but it can be daunting for your social media team to handle customer inquiries on all channels.

Using a different social channel account to provide social media user support solutions might be a smart move for businesses. It assists in removing support and customer care concerns from your central channel. It also guarantees you designate the appropriate crews to watch the proper categories of inbound public posts.

People will continue to contact you for service and support issues using your primary social media names. Instead of checking your primary profile to see if you have a support account, they may just use the known product handle.

If you receive a service request on your primary social media account, forward it to the relevant team and reply from your support channel. Here's how AirFrance uses its bio section on Instagram to redirect customers to the dedicated channel:


Setting up a social media account just for customer support may be appropriate if you're witnessing a significant increase in consumer inquiries. Your customer care team is probably better equipped than your social media marketing group to respond to consumer inquiries quickly and thoroughly. However, make sure that you choose the right usernames that reflect the nature of your business profile.

You can incorporate the Twitter handle of your dedicated company's customer care social media channel in the biographies of your various social media profiles if you develop one. It makes it clear who to contact for requests for support. AirFrance uses this strategy:

AirFrance encourages customers to contact them on Twitter

2. Add Various Contact Options

There were only three methods to contact directly with your consumers: face-to-face, mail, and phone. The proliferation of new technology has dramatically broadened commercial communications. Customer expectations have also grown.

When customers reach out to you via social media channels, it doesn't mean that they want to get their questions solved in-app. They may want to find other contact methods.

When it comes to Facebook marketing, some people prefer using Messenger, an excellent interactive marketing tool. It allows you to improve customer experience and establish brand loyalty. Facebook's recommended practices for developing a potent Messenger messaging experience include: Setting consumer expectations, reacting fast, and keeping it brief and to the point. Michael Kors is one of the world-known brands that uses Facebook Messenger for customer support:

Michael Kors has an action button on FB that redirects to its chatbot

However, keep in mind that customers may want to communicate with you through a live chat on your website. They may also want to find email addresses and share their problems via email or they may want to get in touch with you fast–via a phone call. Thus, it's important to tell your social media followers about all contact methods on your profiles to make it easier for customers to contact you in the most comfortable way.

3. Make the Most Out of Quick Replies

Since people use social media for customer support, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram roll out in-built features that help businesses deal with customer inquiries faster. One of the best features is quick replies.

Quick Replies enable you to get message receiver action by providing buttons within a message. Once you click the rapid reply button, the value of the tab gets to the discussion, and the Messenger Service has a message event to your webhook. Quick responses are a text type that uses the Send API.

Example of quick replies 

Companies will have 24 hours to react to a customer's request. Messages generated within 24 hours may include promotions. At any moment, users can mute or block communication with a business.

When you send a message through an authorized partner, they have the option of attaching fast replies to the communication, which will be visible to users on Twitter or Facebook. Texts that use quick responses will contain any information the enterprise provided in the message they despatched. The pattern makes it simple to design multi-step problem-solving processes.

Using welcome messages and quick replies enables your customers to submit details a business requires to address an issue ahead of the first message reading. It allows for much faster and simpler resolutions.

4. Optimize Accounts for Self-Service Customer Service

To provide outstanding social media customer care, optimize your social media accounts for self-service that allows worried customers to find answers to their questions without contacting your customer support reps.

It reduces the resources and time expenditure linked with the conventional customer support paradigm. Your agents may focus on broader issues, and your clients can get answers quickly in your FAQs or knowledge base.

An optimized self-service forum can also provide information about your client's wants. It gives you insight into what others are discussing about you and your business and what your positives are.

The best part? There's no need to limit your account to boring FAQs. You can learn from Starbucks and create engaging TikTok videos that provide answers to customer questions in a funny way, just like in the example below:

Starbucks creates TikTok videos for customer self-service

Here are several ways to optimize social media profiles for customer self-service:

  • Upload explainer videos
  • Create Instagram Story Highlight albums with FAQs
  • Make customer service guides

5. Ask Your Followers to Share their Feedback

Regardless of the size of your company, gathering and evaluating feedback is crucial to establishing your customers' pain areas, expectations, and wants. Most individuals will never offer favorable or destructive responses if they don't feel your company cares.

Instagram is an excellent platform for feedback. When you offer customer service on Instagram, you enhance client happiness and inspire followers to submit comments. Because big companies understand the importance of customer support, they often use this platform for gathering feedback, too.

For example, Gleniece Skin informed its followers about its product review section and encouraged customers to share their feedback in exchange for getting a discount of 10%. Pretty good, huh?

An Instagram post that encourages customers to share their reviews

You can also involve your consumers in developing new items or improving existing ones to encourage feedback. You can also use live sessions to generate a feeling of immediacy that promotes customer engagement. Followers are more likely to attend your session.

Instagram Story stickers and polls are two things you can use to have your customers engage more with your business stories. If a customer poses a question, click on it to start a new narrative with a response.

Following the poll, your followers can track the number of votes each response received in real time. You may examine the outcomes in the list of viewers. You can also see what every viewer picked right here.

Polls often generate more interactions since users may pick an answer right away. When asked questions, you receive better quality responses from individuals who are enthusiastic about you. That's why you should employ both to gain more followers.

6. Give Social Listening a Try

The way you interact with your clients is crucial to social listening. Routine listening enables your brand to reply, check, and connect with your consumers across social media to enhance client service. More and more businesses claim that social listening is important for achieving business goals.

The importance of social listening for brands

Far beyond the numbers, social listening considers the sentiment underlying the data. The "online mood" is often called "social media sentiment."

Social media sentiment analysis is essential to social media listening since it enables you to understand how your customers perceive you and your competition. Rather than simply noting the frequency of your company’s mentions on social media, consider what you might learn from social dialogues to achieve meaningful business outcomes.

Becoming conscious of social sentiment changes helps you react quickly to unanticipated developments.

Wrap Up

Social media customer care is one of the primary channels for prospective customers to approach your business with inquiries, complaints, and issues. Customers want more and are eager to reward companies that go above and beyond.

Therefore, adopting social media customer support gives you an extra opportunity to impress clients that might provide excellent value to your business. It can also strengthen your relationships with them and, as a result, develop brand loyalty.