Social media is an essential component of your business marketing strategy. It promotes your business and creates an online community where customers can interact and engage with your brand.

Why people contact brands on social media

Increasingly, customers prefer to contact brands via social media over traditional methods:

• Nearly 35% of consumers nominate social media as their preferred method of customer care
• Less than 25% prefer website or live web chat customer care
• Less than 20% prefer email-based customer care
• Call centre customer care comes in last place with just over 16% of consumers preferring phone-based customer care.

They may reach out to:

• Request pre-sale information
• Give feedback
• Complain

Customers also post about their customer care experiences on social media, with 47% of consumers aged 18-34 complaining about a brand’s customer support via social media.

Customer expectations online

Customer care is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Quality customer service leads to greater brand loyalty and higher customer spending, while poor customer service may force customers to abandon a brand.

With more than 60% of customers now expecting brands to offer customer support on social media, it has never been more important to provide social media customer care.

Customer expectations on social media response times are high with:

• 42% of customers expecting a response to their social media complaint within one hour
• 32% expecting a response in under 30 minutes
• 11% expecting an immediate response.

Thirty per cent of customers will switch to a competitor if a brand does not respond to their enquiry or complaint.

Benefits of social media customer care

When done well, social media customer care can have huge benefits for your company.

Social media customer care is highly cost-effective. It costs one dollar to resolve an issue on social media, which is one-sixth the price of resolving an issue via a call centre. Social media customer care agents are more than 160% more efficient than voice agents.

Facebook and Twitter are 48% more accurate and 44% faster methods of delivering customer care responses than email.

High quality social media customer care can yield:

• 92% customer retention
• 81% greater annual increase in revenue from customer referrals
• Increased customer spending of 20%-40%
• Annual return on investment increase of 30.7%
• Improved customer satisfaction rates by a margin of 26.6%

Providing good quality timely customer care via social media reduces call centre and other customer care costs and, most importantly, creates happy customers who will stay loyal to your brand.

Stats and images from Websitebuilder.org. See the full infographic here.