How Can You Use Social Media to Build Customer Relationships?

8 min readOct 13, 2021

‘A happy customer is a loyal customer’ — this is an age-old saying.

In the older times, when businesses essentially had face-to-face interactions with the customers, you could build trust by having a genuine conversation. However, today’s age of online business demands advanced mediums to build customer relationships.

In recent times, social media has greatly impacted the way businesses interact with their customers. It makes perfect sense too — more than half of the total population of the world uses social media in 2021. Moreover, an average user spends 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media. With such extensive and constant user attention, social media has become one of the best mediums we have today to build customer relationships.

Why is it Important to Build Customer Relationships — How Social Media Can Help?

Social media is primarily used as a communication platform by business accounts. You create a brand page, post content, and use it to promote your business. However, now brands have begun to perceive social media as a customer experience platform.

To build a customer relationship with your audience, you need to be in the virtual vicinity of the customers. Since you cannot see them as in a traditional business setting, you have to make most of the tools that bring you closer to social media users. One of them is social media monitoring.

Today, around 70% of people expect businesses to entertain them for their customer service questions on social media. However, social media teams of large-scale businesses can miss out on the abundance of mentions, relevant conversations, and complaints. Social media monitoring can keep you well informed and updated with every happening on social platforms that concern your business. It allows you a chance to monitor user activity on social channels and uses it to build customer relationships. If you strengthen your connection with customers, it will impact your engagement, brand awareness, and ultimately result in high conversion rates.

Here’s how you can leverage social media monitoring to build customer relationships.

Ways to Build Customer Relationships Through Social Media Monitoring

#1 Humanize Your Brand

Gone are the days when brands used to be an unknown, artificial entity for customers. The web, and especially, social media has built the need for transparency. Before making a purchase, 54% of users research the product on social media. Therefore, it is vital that you be active and engage with them.

However, you have to respond in a way that seems natural and not made-up. When you humanize your social media presence and indulge in honest conversation with customers, your business persona strengthens.

Social media monitoring can help you do so by going above and beyond the traditional customer support methods. It allows you to –

Track Sentiments

With the help of social media analytics, you can assess the generic sentiments of the customers dominating your industry.

For example, you are a vegan hair color brand that sells conventional Indian shades. Due to the western influence, there may arise a demand for out-of-the-box, bright hair colors like red, blue, or green. Through your social media monitoring tool, you can track the sentiments of the conversation spreading around. Hence, you can take action to expand your product colors.

Decrease Customer Churn

One of the ways to prevent a high rate of customer churn is communicating with the customer. When you engage with them on social media, you give them a reason to keep coming back to you.

A simple message like, ‘Hey, we understand your concern about the product. Would you mind telling me about your problem in detail so that we can work on it?’ can help you get your customer back. In the end, your human touch to the message has the ability to delight the user. With social media monitoring, you can respond in real-time and ditch the use of automated messages.

#2 Listen and Jump Into the Conversation

Two of the basic functionalities of a social media monitoring tool are to facilitate social media listening and leverage the monitoring. The former allows you to intently listen to the relevant conversations about your industry or your brand. The latter lets you analyze the large data of these conversations. It further segments it into categories. This process helps you determine the conversation that needs your immediate attention.

Take Skyscanner, for example. It is an airline search engine that helps you find the cheapest flights. In addition to offering great bargains, it is also known for providing excellent customer support. A user posted about a glitch on their Facebook account. He was recommended for a 413,786-hour and 25-minute long layover on a trip from New Zealand to London. Their social media manager not only acknowledged the post but also left a witty reply in addition to the solution. Her personalized response got viral and attracted user engagement. Not to mention, it set a great example of building customer relationships through social listening.

Source: Digiday.com

#3 Surprise Your Customers

When you are trying to build customer relationships, you cannot go by the book. You are dealing with humans, and their perspectives and emotions vary.

Therefore, remember two things — first, be ready to break protocols. Social media allows your brand to let go of its professional side a little. You can engage in memes, reply with inoffensive sarcasm, use witty language. Basically, you have the leverage to be flexible and casual as shown in the above example of Skyscanner.

Secondly, aim your efforts at doing something that is out of the box. Undoubtedly, your competitors are also trying to build powerful customer relationships by replying to users and engaging in one-to-one conversations. If you want to attract unusual attention, take extra effort and impress your customers. One way to do this is by crafting memorable moments for them. Customers do not expect brands to go out of their way. With social media monitoring, you can exceed their expectations and surprise them.

Try learning from the example of Gaylord Opryland. A user who stayed at Gaylord Opryland for three years in a row loved the clock radio in her room. She tried to find the same model for three years. When she did not find one, she took to the Twitter page of the company mentioning the same.

Source: helpscout.com

Gaylord Opryland recognized the opportunity to make an unexpected impression on the customer. They sent not one but two spa clocks to her room with a letter for her. With this action, they not only won a lifetime customer but also gathered a lot of goodwill.

Source: helpscout.com

#4 Deal With Complaints Instantly

A customer may or may not publicly appreciate you for your good service in the form of comments, reviews, or ratings. However, they are most likely to rant about your product or service if they face any issue with it. Again, positive feedback is less likely to get viral than negative ones. Therefore, before a few comments and complaints spread and explode into a bad reputation case, take the matter into your hands.

With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can get alerts in real-time about the negative mentions of your brand. Also, you can set the alerts for different channels — email, app, Slack, or other platforms. As a result, every time you see the mentions growing up rapidly, you can get alert. Together with your reputation management team, you can figure out a damage-control plan. In most cases, when you respond instantly, customers appreciate that you care about them and cool down. Thereby, you can save your brand from becoming prey to disappointed customers and trolls. Moreover, when you answer a complaint, customer advocacy increases by as much as 25%. In the opposite situation, when you do not do so, it decreases by as much as 50%.

#5 Embrace the Bright Side of Social Media

Social media is not all about negative comments and trolling. There is a rare, though bright side to the platform. You can embrace that part with the help of your brand.

As we said, a happy customer may take it to social media to appreciate your efforts. When they do, make it a point to respond to them. It is essential to show them that you value their opinion and appreciate their kind words. With the help of social media monitoring, you can track positive mentions about your brand.

Moreover, when you address comments of happy and satisfied customers, it adds to your reputation. Customers trust each other more than they trust the brand.

Squarespace does this really well. They highlight who their customers are, and how their company is helping them achieve their dreams and goals. By recognizing their happy customers, they are setting an example of their good service. Consequently, it helps them to build customer relationships.

Source: ringcentral.com

Must Read: “It’s All About Relationships!” An Interview with Ted Rubin

How Can You Build Customer Relationships With Mentionlytics?

To leverage the benefit of social media monitoring to its best extent, you need to invest in an evolved, feature-rich tool. Mentionlytics, a leading web, and social media monitoring tool, can assist you closely with the ever-increasing demands of your industry.

We provide our customers with an easy user interface so that they can browse through every data analytics with zero confusion. No matter if you are a marketing team head, a social media team manager, or a customer service analyst, our structure and efficient service will help you enhance your customer experience.

With Mentionlytics, you can perform the following functions to build customer relationships –

Improve your social media content.
Know when you should post your content on different social media platforms for better reach.
Find your mentions collectively in one place in a structured format.
Identify trolling before it begins damaging your reputation and suggest ways to resolve or handle the issue.

You can improve your web and social media presence by collaborating with Mentionlytics. Consequently, witness your team save time and effort to reach the business goals.

We hope you gained valuable insights from this blog post. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team here.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-can-you-use-social-media-to-build-customer-relationships/