Whether you monitor one business Facebook page for your company's main office, or 30 individual pages for every location, there are a few things you can do to become more efficient. No matter your situation, we hope these best practices will help you get the most out of social media monitoring.
Why Monitor?
When we refer to 'monitoring social media', we are talking about keeping tabs on your social media profiles and how people engage with them. While likes and shares don't require a response from you, comments and reviews certainly do. It is important that you take advantage of all social media has to offer and engage with your audiences. If a customer comments on a photo, acknowledge them with a response. If you receive a direct message, respond in a timely manner. When you receive a review (good or bad), make sure you reply to the reviewer. The reality is there's no reason for you to have a social media presence if you aren't going to be social!
Monitoring Best Practices
Use the App
Monitoring doesn't stop when the work day is over. Make sure you have all of the apps for your social media profiles on your phone or tablet. This makes it easy to monitor on-the-go while away from your desk. If you have a Facebook presence, consider downloading the Pages app. This app will keep your business notifications separate from your personal notifications, making monitoring much easier to do.
When to Monitor
As mentioned above, monitoring doesn't end at 5pm. Customers are active on nights and weekends, which means you should be too. While you don't necessarily need to monitor in the middle of the night (that's a decision your company will have to discuss), monitoring until 9pm and on Saturdays and Sundays is a good idea. Your customers may not be able to reach out until 5pm on a Friday and making them wait until Monday morning for a response can seriously harm your credibility.
Creating Common Responses
Having a saved bank of common questions and responses is a great way to be more efficient when monitoring. This is especially helpful if you have multiple people monitoring and responding to customers. We recommend identifying the most frequently asked questions, determining common responses and procedures for handling those inquiries and saving them in a shared location, such as in Google Docs.
Handling Negativity
Many businesses steer clear of social media altogether because they are afraid of the negative feedback. The unfortunate truth is that those conversations are going to occur online no matter what. Social media offers the opportunity to take control of them. The worst thing you can do with a negative comment (other than fly off the handle) is ignore it. Ignoring the negativity will just raise red flags to potential customers. Instead, your best course of action is to acknowledge the comment and publicly try to rectify the situation.
There are cases when you may want a comment or review removed (i.e. profanity, inaccuracy, threatening material). You do have the ability on Facebook to hide or delete a comment and ban a user if necessary. As far as reviews go, you will need to report the review and hope Facebook's support team is willing to remove it. But keep in mind, you should not be removing comments or reviews just because they are negative. Customers will catch on to this and it doesn't look good.
Taking it Offline
Once you have addressed a negative comment with a customer, work to take the conversation offline. The last thing you want to do is escalate the situation on your Facebook page for all to see. Instead, acknowledge your customer's concerns and ask that he or she email or call you to rectify the situation.
Monitoring multiple social media pages can be time-consuming. If you find that you don't have the resources you need to give social monitoring the full attention it deserves, contact Informatics Inc. Our Digital Marketing Team is experienced in monitoring social media for a variety of clients during days, nights and weekends.
