7 Best Practices for Facebook and Instagram Comment Moderation
While social media is best known as a place to easily share content in real-time, businesses quickly realized the undeniable benefits of using their social platforms to connect with the more than 3.8 billion people that use some form of social media.
Communicating over social media allows you to break down the typical formal barriers that separate businesses from their consumers. It’s a great way to be personal, but it’s also important for driving your brand image, and coming across as a thoughtful, caring company. Here are a few best practices for moderating your comment sections and direct messages on your public social platforms to engage your customers and build strong relationships.
1. Respond to Everything
Your business should respond to all customer comments, even if the reply is as simple as a “like” or emoji. This encourages your customers to interact with your brand, and leads to consumer trust, brand recognition, and ultimately increased sales. According to Forrester, 80% of consumers use social media to engage with brands. That’s a huge market that you’re neglecting if you’re not responding to your customers’ comments.
If this doesn’t seem feasible to your company, either because of employee bandwidth or too many social media interactions to keep up with, Chatdesk Teams can help you respond to social media comments 24/7 with personalized responses that perfectly match your brand voice from day one.
2. Paid Ad Comments Matter, Too
When you run paid ads, you don’t just set them and forget them. Customer interactions happen there, too, especially since they are targeted to your ideal audience. Take the same response measures that you would for your organic social posts so that your future and current customers know you’re always available to help.
3. Make it Personal
Nothing about an automated response feels warm or helpful. According to Hubspot data, 86% of consumers prefer an authentic and honest brand personality on social networks. You want to reflect your brand’s tone while also showing that you’ve got real humans manning your channels. Show some personality and throw in an emoji here or there — your customers will appreciate your authenticity.
4. Address Sensitive Comments
Don’t shy away from sensitive comments. If a customer is asking tough questions, they should be addressed the same as if they were praising your brand. It’s important to be transparent when you can, and if you ignore the comments or questions, other consumers may begin to doubt your brand’s motives.
If, for example, someone directly asks you a touchy question about your pricing being too high, where your products are made or how environmentally sustainable you are, be honest. There are other ways for them to find out the truth, and if you’re upfront, you have the chance to show your brand’s integrity and potentially turn a detractor into a customer relationship.
5. Don’t Stand for Trolls
If someone is harassing your company on social media, don’t be afraid to hide their comments, or even block the individual. Spreading lies, being overly aggressive, or making groundless claims about your company are all reason enough for you to remove someone from your follower list. If you allow this behavior, you risk other followers believing them and tarnishing your brand’s reputation.
6. Use Your DMs
If a response to a question or comment on your page requires the disclosure of order numbers or other sensitive information, shift over to your Direct Messages (DMs) or email. Order-related questions or questions that may require a more in-depth response are good to handle through your inbox rather than in your comment section. Simply add a note to the comment acknowledging that you’re switching your communication to your DMs so the customer knows to check their inbox, and any other followers that may come across the conversation know that you didn’t neglect to respond.
7. Use Social Listening to Improve Your Business
Your comments can tell you a lot about what may be missing from a segment of your business. If you’re getting loads of the same questions about a certain product, you can update your FAQs to address the question instead of posting the same response dozens of times. If you find that you’ve received a large number of customer comments about long hold times for your phone lines, you can prioritize more help for customer support.
Many companies simply don’t have the time to meticulously go through every single comment across multiple channels to identify commonalities. Chatdesk Trends can analyze your social comments across all platforms to identify what your customers are saying about your brand, and automatically tag and sort them in a way that’s digestible and easy to analyze. Not only will you save hours upon hours of time, you’ll be able to quickly identify the most pressing issues your customers are facing, and make moves to address them.
Moderate Your Messages with Chatdesk
Maintaining a business, much less a social media presence, is extremely time consuming. See all the ways Chatdesk’s personalized customer support can proactively and reactively assist you with helping your customers 24/7. Create a free account or schedule a demo here.
