Are your customers active on Facebook?<\/p>\n
Have you got a plan to support your customers via Facebook?<\/p>\n
To learn how to use Facebook to support customers, I interview Mari Smith.<\/p>\n
Recent Updates: Instant Articles and Facebook Messenger<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Instant Articles<\/span><\/a> were inspired by the video autoplay function on Facebook.\u00a0Instant Articles<\/span><\/a>, which make\u00a0content more appealing, enticing and engaging, are only visible on the iPhone at this time.<\/p>\n Currently there are only nine\u00a0media partners that can create\u00a0Instant Articles, which are posts\u00a0that\u00a0come alive with audio and movement<\/span><\/a> on the page (animation, video).\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times<\/span><\/em>, National Geographic<\/span><\/em>, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic<\/span><\/em>, The Guardian<\/span><\/em> and\u00a0BBC News are some of the\u00a0publishers creating these\u00a0interactive articles.<\/p>\n At the F8 Conference<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in March 2015, Facebook announced they\u2019re opening up the Messenger API<\/span><\/a>. This\u00a0means any third-party developer can create an app that will work with Messenger. So if someone sends you a link to something in a Facebook message, it may ask you to install an app when you click on it.<\/p>\n Messenger is also integrating with businesses<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0although there are only a few online merchants doing this as of now. With this functionality, when people make a purchase, Messenger will ask them\u00a0if they\u00a0want to get updates for this merchant via Facebook Messenger. That\u2019s almost as good as having a person\u2019s cell phone number, Mari explains, because there\u2019s a high open rate for SMS messages.<\/p>\n Using this technology, merchants can make purchase recommendations or send\u00a0shipment updates via Messenger, for example. It basically opens up the dialog between the business\u00a0and the customer.<\/p>\n Why businesses should use Facebook for customer service<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Facebook should be part of a business\u2019s customer service plan<\/span>, since\u00a0most people\u00a0are already on Facebook and many use\u00a0Facebook through mobile devices<\/span>.<\/p>\n Companies\u00a0should also look at the features recently added for business pages on Facebook<\/span>. The newest call to action button on ads is \u201cCall Now.\u201d Facebook wants people to call businesses. They realize if a phone is in someone\u2019s hand, they can just press the Call button. The challenge is businesses would need to have staff on standby or a system in place to be able to handle the incoming inquiries.<\/p>\n How to make a\u00a0Facebook page customer-service friendly<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Businesses need to do to help consumers find their page on Facebook. First, give\u00a0your page an\u00a0obvious and intuitive name, so when users search, they will find you. (Hint: Do your own searches on Facebook and Google to make sure your page comes up.) Also, include good keywords in the About section.<\/p>\n Next, have a good cover image that you change regularly. Use the\u00a0call to action button on your page, and possibly include\u00a0text\u00a0on the image itself.<\/p>\n Businesses need to consider whether they should leave their wall open to posts. If your wall is open, customers will write on it. If your wall is turned off, customers are likely to comment on an existing post. If a major brand with millions of fans gets thousands of comments, it\u2019s just not humanly possible to put enough staff on to manage them all.<\/p>\n Your business may want to enable the Message feature, because Facebook strips out spam. Oreo, which has 40 million fans, keeps\u00a0their Message button enabled. If a user sees \u201cMessage\u201d on your Facebook page<\/span>, they know they can tap it\u00a0on their phone or click it on the desktop and write directly to the page admins.<\/p>\n Messages provide a golden opportunity for companies to develop relationships with the people who contact\u00a0them. Note: the message must be initiated by the user.<\/p>\n For managing messages, there\u2019s a Facebook Mentions app<\/span><\/a>for verified accounts (if you can use it, then you qualify)\u00a0and the\u00a0Facebook Pages app<\/span><\/a>. Agorapulse<\/span><\/a>, Spredfast<\/span><\/a>, Sprinklr<\/span><\/a>and NetBase<\/span><\/a>\u00a0are more for\u00a0social media management and enterprise solutions.<\/p>\n Best practices for dealing with negative comments and spammers<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n If your page gets negative comments, respond quickly, apologize and ask the customer to email you directly so you can find a solution.<\/p>\n Some community members\u00a0don\u2019t want help, they just want to complain. Those are the ones to watch out for.<\/p>\n Where spammers are concerned, in addition to blocking and deleting them, page managers can change the profanity and page moderation settings on their business page.<\/p>\n If necessary, update the\u00a0profanity section to block medium or strong language. Set page moderation\u00a0to block posts and comments containing the\u00a0keywords you determine.<\/p>\n People skills for page managers<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The number-one skill page managers need is emotional intelligence.\u00a0It means that you\u2019re able to make logical decisions, and avoid getting fired up.<\/p>\n In this context of customer service on Facebook<\/span>, if someone\u2019s upset and their emotions are running high, the person managing your page needs to be able to realize the person is having a really bad day\u00a0and\u00a0not take it personally. Responding with\u00a0emotion only\u00a0makes things\u00a0worse.<\/p>\n Sometime you just need to go off-script and empower your team members to do so, if they need to handle a dissatisfied customer.<\/p>\n That\u2019s an important aspect of training and customer service. You can\u2019t have people reading\u00a0off of a script, because it feels canned and makes customers feel like you don\u2019t understand their situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are your customers active on Facebook? Have you got a plan to support your customers via Facebook? To learn how to use Facebook to support customers, I interview Mari Smith. Supporting Customers With Facebook Recent Updates: Instant Articles and Facebook Messenger Instant Articles were inspired by the video autoplay function on Facebook.\u00a0Instant Articles, which make\u00a0content […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3069"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3071,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions\/3071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}