And, hate to break it to you, but wherever they want to talk, your customer support representatives should be available. So, why social media and where do you go?

It’s possible that you don’t need to use social media at all if your audience isn’t asking for it. As you’ll see in some of the insightful metrics below, there are a few demographics that actually don’t want to use social media as a method for communication, and a few that want it to be the only channel that they have to use. So, the first step in determining where you should be offering support is knowing more about your users and where they are spending time. After that, this list of metrics, and some pros and cons of social media support as a whole should help get you clear on what the best tactics for your business will be.

• Between Q2 and Q3 of 2017, the number of social media users skyrocketed by 121 million.
• Mature users aged 55-64 are more than twice as likely to interact with branded content than their younger social media consuming counterparts.
• We spend a lifetime average of five years and three months on social media.
• 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business profile, and 200 million of those users are consistently checking in to see what their favorite brands are up to.
• You better be on your toes. 53 percent of Twitter users expect a response from a business in less than an hour. But, if they’re upset or have a problem, that number rises to 72 percent.
• 80% of Twitter users access the network from their smartphone.
• Consumers that land on your site through Pinterest are 10 times more likely to complete a purchase than visitors that have come through other referrals.
• They also spend more, with an average spend of $140-$180 compared to those coming from Facebook that spends an average of $60-$80.

So, depending on what you are looking to accomplish with your social media presence and providing support, there are a few different platforms that could be useful for you to invest in. Now that you have some of that knowledge under your belt, here are the pros and cons of social media that you should consider before jumping in:

Pros & Cons

With the pros and cons, as well as the list of metrics above, you’re probably about ready to get started using social media for support. We’ve collected a series of tips, both for you as the company, and for your employees, that will help you get started, or turn pro if you’re already using social media to help your customers.

Tips on social media support for the company

• Pick the best platform for your business. While it can be tempting to just jump on board every single platform where you have customers, do your research and making sure your spending effort where it will be best rewarded. Social media is very time-consuming, because of the effort that it requires to respond quickly, so going with fewer rather than more will mean you have more effort available to provide excellent experiences for your customers.
• Monitor social media mentions, and don’t forget to look for the less obvious ones. While many customers will directly mention your company or tag you in a post if they need help, others may be less direct. While monitoring mentions on social media, also make sure to look for variations of the spelling of your company name. That way you can be sure to address issues that may have gotten lost otherwise, especially if the person forgot to tag you directly mistakenly.
• Consider setting up a dedicated channel for support. Many companies choose to have separate accounts for their support team from their marketing team, and it can be very useful. Not only does it keep your support responses from showing up on what is effectively an advertising machine, but it also keeps so many cooks out of the kitchen. When you have multiple support employees and marketing team members working in one or two social media channels, it can get to be a lot if there is something like a launch or an outage. Consider separating the two out, if you get a lot of traction.
• Build best practices about responding. As a company, you should have policies for how you respond to specific types of tickets. For example, if a customer is talking poorly about another company, in favor of yours, should you like the tweet or just ignore it? If you are being trolled, do you respond, or leave it alone? These are important things to draw lines on early on, as they set the tone and the public face of your company over social media.
• Choose the right hashtags. Try to find hashtags that work for your brand and for your support, if you’re trying to draw attention to it. Similarly, don’t just spam all of your hashtags on every single post — it doesn’t make sense and may lose your audience members.

Tips on social media support for the support representative

• Speed matters. Pay attention to how quickly you are writing back. If you don’t already have macros or snippets set up for things that you say frequently, consider doing so. Giving yourself the option to use a quick canned reply can shave a few seconds off of your response time as you power through the queue.
• Use the right tone of voice. Just like in email, it’s important to be able to read a customer and respond to them in a way that makes sense for them. For example, if a customer is very serious and angry, you should likely be using very toned down language. If a customer is funny or jokingly flirtatious, you can respond in a way that is reciprocal without being inappropriate. As long as what you’re saying falls in line with your brand guidelines, you’re good to go!
• Take things offline when necessary. Some issues are not the best to solve publically via social media, or even via social media direct message. Some examples of these are issues where you might need personal information from a customer, or credentials to log in to a specific site for troubleshooting. Other issues that might be better solved in another channel (either email or over the phone), may be advanced troubleshooting problems that need to be escalated to another team or team member. If it becomes evident that you’ve got a case like that, direct them to email into your team (or call, if that’s where you’re going), and then keep an eye out for their message so that it doesn’t go missing. The worst thing that you could possibly do would be to tell them to reach out elsewhere, and then make them wait to get a response.
• Use your knowledge base to make things easy. Explaining things over social media, especially if there is a character limit, can be super hard. Luckily, you’ve probably got an amazing knowledge base that you can pull links from and send to customers to make explaining easy. Use your knowledge base liberally when providing social media support. Also, pay attention to documentation that you wish you had so that you can go back and create it later. Chances are if you want it, your customers want it too.
• Choose how you react. Using the guidelines provided by your company, choose carefully how you react. Know ahead of time whether you would like, respond to, or ignore something. If you aren’t clear on that or don’t think that your team has a lot of clarity, it might be time to have a conversation and get it defined. Without alignment, you run the risk of doing something off-brand in a heightened social situation that could easily be shared or taken out of context.

Suggested Tools

Social media can be one of the most versatile ways to provide support. There are so many different channels, and the audience members on each have different expectations and preferences. One tool that we recommend that makes it easy to monitor and respond to all social media under one roof is Buffer. But, along with Buffer, here is a full list that they provide of other tools that might be useful:

• Buffer Reply
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Agorapulse
• Zoho Social
• Brand24
• Mention
• Social Mention
• Keyhole
• Trackur
• Buzzlogix
• TweetDeck
• Iconosquare
• Tailwind
• Sendible
• Union Metrics
• HubSpot
• NUVI
• Falcon.io
• Talkwalker

They’ve also created an amazing spreadsheet that allows you to compare information like:

• How much do the plans cost?
• Does it have a free plan, free trial, or free demo?
• Is it a standalone monitoring tool or is it part of a social media management tool?
• What platforms are supported?
• What are the main monitoring features?
• Can I reply directly through the tool?

Using this, you should be able to narrow down not only what you should be providing for social media channels, but also where you can best monitor it and find the tools that will be beneficial for your team.