In today’s digital age, social media has become a crucial part of every business’s marketing and communication strategy.

With the majority of consumers using social media platforms to engage with brands, it is imperative that businesses provide effective customer service on social media.  Social media customer service not only helps businesses to engage with their customers in real-time but also allows them to build trust, improve brand reputation, and increase customer loyalty.

If you still consider having social media customer service as an additional liability and have no idea about its importance – then you are at the right place. In this article, you’ll get to know about the benefits of social customer service just for your socials that will not only contribute to your brand’s reputation but will also boost its lead generation efforts. So, keep scrolling!

Benefits Of Social Media Customer Service

1. Address Customer Queries Faster

With traditional customer service methods like phone or email, addressing customer queries takes at least 24 hours to 48 hours during working days. But, on social media, you can resolve your customer’s issues comparatively faster – within just a couple of minutes.

By using social media to handle customer inquiries, businesses can provide a quicker turnaround time for responses, ensuring that customers receive the support they need in a timely manner.

Social media provides a platform for businesses to engage with customers in real time. Through live chat and direct messaging, businesses can provide personalized and interactive support to their customers that can help to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Imagine, if it had been an email – how much time it would have taken to resolve the issue considering the continuous to and fro processes for each and every response. Besides, it’s quite unlikely for your customers to be active on their emails 24×7.

2. Increase Brand Awareness By Reaching More Customers Across The Globe

Brand awareness isn’t a one-time strategy for your brand – it’s an ongoing process, and providing customer service on social media gives you an edge to boost your branding strategy.

When you address your customer’s queries faster on a public forum like social media, you gain more eyeballs from your potential leads. When they see your response to customer requests, they will understand that you take your customers’ complaints seriously. Such an approach demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction, which can help to increase brand awareness.

3. Get Your Leads Organically Through Positive Word Of Mouth

Social media provides a platform for businesses to engage with potential leads and nurture relationships actively. By responding to comments and messages in a timely and helpful manner, businesses can show potential customers that they are attentive and committed to providing excellent service. This can help build trust and establish a positive brand reputation, ultimately leading to increased conversions and sales.

4. Give A Boost To Customer Loyalty By Increasing The Rate Of Customer Retention

Social media customer service can give a boost to customer loyalty and retention in two major ways:

By providing timely and effective support on social media, you can address any issues or concerns that your customers may have and resolve them quickly. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and a greater likelihood of customers returning to do business with your brand in the future.

Social customer service provides an opportunity to gather feedback and insights from customers using social media analytics tools. These customer insights can be helpful in improving your products and services and tailoring them to meet your customer needs better. By taking into account customer feedback, you can show that you are committed to improving the customer experience, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.

5. Encourage Social Selling By Addressing Customer Objections Instantly

Social media offers a real-time platform for businesses to engage with customers, respond to their questions and concerns, and address any objections they may have to a product or service.

When you offer helpful and on-time responses to your customers, it shows how much you, as a brand, care about your customers’ problems. Such an impression encourages brand loyalty among customers and instills a credible brand image that helps increase sales.

Moreover, by addressing objections instantly, you can overcome any reservations that potential customers may have about a product or service. This will generate positive word of mouth because your customers will surely go ahead and share their positive experiences with your brand in their network, which will ultimately boost your social selling scopes.

6. Handle Your Brand’s Crisis Situations Better By Addressing Issues Promptly On Socials

Be it a bad customer experience or a false rumor on social media – such crises are quite major for online brands these days and end up impacting the brand’s image. However, in such a crisis, your brand can use social media to address customer concerns and update your followers promptly. This can help prevent the spread of misinformation, mitigate reputational damage, and maintain customer trust and support during crises.

By addressing your customers’ negative and positive concerns on social media, your brand can remain transparent and show that you’re taking serious steps to resolve the issue. This can help to alleviate customer problems and prevent the situation from escalating.

7. Enjoy Scopes Of Better Social Listening For Your Brand

By monitoring social channels and listening to what your customers say on social media, you can quickly identify customer issues, track sentiment around your brand, and gather valuable feedback on your products and services.

This information can be used to improve your customer experience and make data-driven decisions that drive business growth. With social listening, you can also stay ahead of potential crises, address negative feedback promptly, and maintain a positive brand image on social media.

There are also ample tools like Hootsuite, which can help you perform better social listening without spending hours on social media channels searching for your brand mentions or analyzing your customer conversations. However, if the price is a major concern for you, there are many Hootuiste alternatives that help you enjoy the same features without making a dent in your pocket.

Conclusion

Social media platforms are undoubtedly the best place to advertise a business and with the increasing reliance of consumers on these channels to communicate with brands, businesses cannot afford to ignore the importance of providing effective customer service on social media. By embracing social media as a critical customer support channel, businesses can gain a competitive edge, boost customer satisfaction, and drive growth and revenue in the long run.

Are you leveraging the power of social media to provide exceptional customer support and drive business growth?

This week I’ve been fortunate enough to get access to both Google Bard and the New Bing, so a day later, I’m here to share my first impressions.

What is the new Bing?

“The new Bing” is the product of Microsoft’s unholy alliance with OpenAI, makers of the now infamous ChatGPT. This development promises to have seismic effects on the search ecosystem, with Microsoft’s CEO saying they’re happy to accept “demonetization” of search in their pursuit of market share, and Google extremely concerned about the threat ChatGPT technology poses as an alternative to their core search business.

Of course, by now we’ve all also seen various viral posts and tweets showing just how dangerous it can be to use chat AI as a search engine, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that Bing is making moves.

When I perform a search on “old bing” now, I can see this box inviting me to try the new one. You’ll notice a key detail here: it’s only available in Microsoft Edge. Yikes. Big Microsoft Energy. Fortunately for you, the reader, I have dusted off everyone’s fourth-favorite browser so you don’t have to.

Performing the same search in the new Bing, I can see identical organic results, but rather different features:

The “mustelid masters” box above the organic results is new, and contains AI-generated text with a voice-to-speech capability. It’s a six-part story, with sometimes surprising accompanying imagery:

You can see here that a picture of wrestling has been sourced to accompany the text about badgers wrestling. These AI-generated boxes don’t appear for most queries — only clear and uncontroversial informational intents.

The phrase “Mustelid masters” itself seems to be original to this box.

Lastly, one of the tabs in the story cites the Wisconsin Badgers, and a page which is entirely unrelated to the content at hand, so perhaps Bing is also citing its sources for disambiguation here?

You’ll notice the addition of an “Open Website” button next to the top result on the SERP — perhaps a way of compensating a little for loss of organic click through rate?

The “chat” tab is also present on old Bing, but just shows you a message telling you to go to Microsoft Edge.

The phrase “conversational search” here is interesting, given this was a phrase Google introduced in 2013.

If we do use Microsoft Edge, we see a chatbot interface in this tab, but with some nice additions. Switching over to this from a regular search result pre-loads my previous query from organic search:

There’s a bunch of different modes available at the top, and also citations in the search results — both welcome improvements over the likes of ChatGPT.

Now, how about Bard?

What is Google Bard?

Well, not very self-confident, for one. But that’s probably a good thing.

Bard is also, right now, not anywhere near as integrated with search. In their announcement on February 6th, Google teased Bard in a way that made it look very much like a SERP feature, similar to Bing:

However, the version we have to play with now is more of a dedicated chatbot interface.

It was probably already the case that Google was pushed to move far sooner than they hoped with this technology, and of course they have much more to lose from messing with organic search than Bing does. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see the slower and more cautious approach.

Now, it probably should be noted that chatbots are not really designed for me to just enter a one word keyword like “badgers”, like I might do in organic search. But, like Bing’s chat tab, I get something resembling an informational result. So, let’s compare side by side.

Bard vs. new Bing, side-by-side

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

The most obvious difference, at least to an SEO’s eye, is the presence of citations in the Bing result. Not knowing where source information comes from is one of the biggest challenges for users when dealing with this kind of technology, so that’s a huge differentiator.

Bard does claim to include citations. My colleague Mike was able to trigger them, and captured it in this clip. It’s definitely far, far less ubiquitous than on Bing.

That said, I like that the framing of Google’s solution — with multiple draft answers presented and “enter a prompt here” — which makes it clearer I’m dealing with something that is not a source of unassailable truth.

I was also intrigued by the localization of Bing’s result. It mentions the UK in its response, which is where I’m searching from, and shows UK websites in the citations. So I asked them both a follow-up question about my location:

Bing repeats itself, but Bard just seems to assume I’m in the US. Unfortunate.

Slightly commercial query

Many SEOs will be more interested in how technology like this might fit into their marketing funnel. Let’s try a classic top-of-funnel query:

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

There isn’t really an objective answer here, but both results are broadly sensible. That said, the Bing answer is both a narrower list and far richer.

Interestingly, neither result seems deterministic.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

Bing can produce different answers to the same question in different windows, and so can Google.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

This may be a contentious point when SEOs start optimizing for these answers, and want to measure their results. Of course, regular organic rankings can vary massively between locales and even days of the week, but generally speaking, if you search twice from the same computer (in private browsing windows etc) you’ll get the same results. Not so here.

Conspiracy theories

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison. 

Neither solution fell for some obvious conspiracy theory bait, which is encouraging to see. I actually don’t mind at all Google’s more cautious “I can’t assist with that” here. I wasn’t able to provoke a similar reaction out of Bing for any query, but I also wasn’t able to provoke it to say anything abhorrent – I’m sure others will, though.

What next for SEOs?

For both platforms there are major questions before SEOs can really engage and consider them an important part of their work.

For Bing, will this have adoption? Most SEOs have not made the habit of optimizing for Bing in recent years, but there is already talk of increased Bing market share.

For Bard, how, if at all, will this be integrated in search? The current platform is clearly marked as an experiment, and is more like ChatGPT than it is like the mock ups Google showed us in February. Or will users be encouraged to use it as its own thing?

For both platforms, there are big questions about how SEOs might go about optimizing to get their clients mentioned, and indeed favorably mentioned in results – there are lots of nefarious possibilities here, and Wikipedia is probably the most obvious. Once mentioned, how does one measure this? When I clicked through to my own site from Bing’s chat tab, it just appeared like any other Bing organic traffic. Rank tracking is an interesting problem too, and you can be sure that Moz and STAT will be posting in future about how we’re handling these features — watch this space!

Our 2023 Marketing Trends Report found that data-driven marketers will win in 2023. It makes sense, but data analysis can be challenging and time-consuming for many businesses.

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