Three smart ways to deal with your customers’ queries and posts on social media

Setting up your company’s social media has been a success. The uploaded pictures are high quality, all of the important information is clearly visible, and the about sections are concise with a good selection of keywords. As you lean back in your chair and eyeball your creations, only one word springs to mind: ‘slick’. But then another thought creeps in… what do I do when people actually start interacting with my accounts?

Not to fear. We’ve pinned down three tips on how to smartly deal with incoming messages and posts!

1. Minimise public complaints

Complaints are going to happen. No matter how well-oiled your business is, there’s always room for human error or - depending on your viewpoint - an overly fussy customer. What you don’t want to happen are such complaints being made public.

The default setting for Twitter is such that two accounts must follow each other to exchange direct messages. This means that if a customer wants to get in touch, they have to do so publically unless you follow them back.

To get around this, head into the ‘Privacy and safety’ section of your settings and tick the option to ‘Receive direct messages from anyone’. Now anyone will be able to direct message you! (Don’t worry – you can reject anything unimportant or not relevant).

2. Give yourself time to find the answers to difficult customer queries

Now that your customers can easily get in touch privately via Twitter, there’s another potential problem: what if you don’t know the answer to their question straight away? Although it’s best practice to get back to queries as quickly as possible, there will be times

when you need to bide time. Perhaps your head of operations isn’t contactable for the next hour, and they’re the only one who knows the answer!

Send/receive receipts are automatically active on Twitter - this means people getting in touch know if you’ve seen their direct message. It won’t reflect well on your business if customers know you haven’t replied to a seen message. The option to turn send/receive read receipts off is again in the ‘Privacy and safety’ section of your settings.

3. Minimise unwanted posts on your Facebook page

Most Facebook users want to interact with business pages to learn, support, and engage. But some users aren’t looking for anything logical - some users just want to watch the world burn. They might post something strange and unwanted on your page, or - heaven forbid - swear.

As a Facebook admin, you have two methods to filter out unwanted posts on your page: the ‘Profanity filter’ and the ‘Page moderation’ feature, both of which are found in the ‘General’ tab of your settings.

The ‘Profanity filter’ is relatively self-explanatory: once turned on it will filter out posts that use profanity. ‘Page moderation’ allows you to filter out posts that use specific words. Maybe you don’t want the word ‘waffles’ posted on your wall. Fair enough. Pop that in the page moderation box, click save, and waffles will be seen no more.

Utilising these methods will remove a lot of the stress from dealing with your customers’ queries and posts on social. Let us know if you figure out any other methods!