Businesses are falling all over themselves to get social media right. There is no doubt that being present on all the prominent social media channels leads to better credibility and improved brand recall in the minds of your target consumer segments.
However, companies consistently fail to realize that a Like or a Follow does not lead to advocacy or engagement. Consumers are fickle-minded, spoiled for choice, perennially distracted, and unless your restaurant cooks the best creamy pasta in the world, chances of them liking your Facebook posts in big numbers are low.
But there’s no need to get disheartened. If anything, take this as a timely reminder for you to get serious about your customer service and invest in ways to get your customers to like you more. I jokingly referred to pasta earlier, except I wasn’t really joking.
Be so good that people can’t help being happy with you and recommending you, and of course, keep coming back to you! This is really the easiest way to get more likes on social while also steadily growing your customer base.
Get More Likes on Social
Don’t Get Too Caught Up in the ‘Like’ Game
Here’s a question for you. As a business owner, how many companies (especially in your industry) do you personally like and how many have you formally given a thumbs-up on their Facebook page?
Here are a couple of ways in which you can spread awareness about your social media presence among your customers:
- Link to your social media pages via your website and newsletters. (Yes, you will need to be sending out newsletters for this purpose.)
- Promote entertaining and helpful content via your social media presence.
Yes, those are the fundamentals. Anything else is just tactics.
Back Up Your Pasta with Excellent Customer Service
Yes, it matters what you sell.
But equally important is how you sell it. Do you do it with patience, enthusiasm, and consideration for your customers? Or do you do it just because you have to, bracing yourself each morning for dealing with insufferable people ceaseless in their demands and relentless in their criticism?
It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that the former is a reliably better strategy of entertaining people. Hire your customer service people with great care. You want them to be calm, articulate, and skilled at interpersonal dealings.
They should be able to gauge the sentiments of the customers they are handling. They should love to talk to people and help them out. These are all very important criteria. Short-tempered or indifferent people, no matter how skilled, should be nowhere near dealing with customers; bad customer service can ruin a good product.
Instead:
- Deal with all customer queries promptly and politely, whether on the phone, via email, or in person.
- If you mess up at any point, apologize quickly and offer to set things right.
- Never ever ignore a customer. That’s the fastest way of losing them and creating bad business karma. Customers whom you ignore may find you on social media and post uncomfortable questions on your Facebook Wall, running away from which will be practically impossible. Or they may pen a scathing review on a review website, causing your credibility considerable harm. Your best bet is not to let things come to such a sorry pass.
Handling Customer Service via Social Media
Let’s begin with an excellent example of customer service from Waitrose:
Social media is a great platform for you to showcase your customer service and garner all-round praise. But things can get tricky here because of the real time nature of conversations and thousands of people (potential customers) lurking in the background.
The payoff, however, is huge.
To get more likes on social, here are some tips to help you convert your social media presence into a channel that helps your customers:
- Respond on time. As per a study, 42 percent of customers want a response to their query on social media within an hour. If you can help it, don’t keep your customers waiting.
- Engage your followers in lively discussions by posting relevant content (preferably produced by you) or encouraging them to share their experiences with you.
- Accept customer feedback gracefully. If you implement any of their suggestions, acknowledge it publicly.
- Be proactive than reactive. Offer to help out your customers in any which way you can. Ask them what they like the most about your business. Keep them up-to-date about new developments at your end.
- It is pointless not to take advantage of the wide variety of CRM tools available.LiveChat for on-the-spot, timely responses and Wrike for collaboration between your marketing and customer service teams are just a couple of examples that come to mind.
Customers need to know they are being valued, and the above will show them you care. The more people think you care for them, the more they will like you.
In Conclusion
If you want to get more likes on social media from customers, it requires a holistic approach on your part.
If you want more people to like you and become loyal customers, you will have to make excellent customer service a priority. You’ll have to hire the best people that you can find, and master the strategies that are guaranteed to win you a bigger fan base and consequentially a greater competitive advantage.
[“source-smallbiztrends”]
