Social Media Response Times, Are You Fast Enough [+Infographic]

Are you responding quickly enough to your customers on social media?

Imagine you go to a store of your favorite sneaker brand; you're ready to make a purchase but have a query. You ask your question at the front desk, but there's no response. And you have to wait hours or even days for an answer.

Pretty frustrating & unbelievable, right? And chances are you're not going to end up making that purchase.

This is exactly how your followers or customers feel when they leave a comment on your social and end up not getting any response.

So why are we pretending that social media response times are different?

In this post, we'll take a look at why you need to speed up your social media response times, along with tips on how to do it effectively.

Click here to download detailed infographic on tips to speed up your social media response times.

Why Social Media Response Times Are Critical

When it comes to social media, most brands stick to the old-fashioned approach of broadcasting their messages to the public.

They struggle to reply in a timely fashion, and many don't respond at all.

This negligence can easily lead to a loss in customer loyalty & business.

Here are some more reasons why social media response time matters for your business:

Competitive Advantage

If you fail to respond timely to an angry customer on social, the odds are that there's a competitor eyeing them.

"Faced with poor customer service, 39 percent would never use the offending company again, 37 percent would change suppliers".

Social media customer service helps distinguish a business from its competitors.

"Poor customer service costs businesses up to $75 billion in the United States alone."

If you have a proactive customer service strategy in place, it can help you connect to your customers faster and even help you get new ones.

Reduce Churn

Customer acquisition costs are rapidly increasing, and you cannot afford to lose existing customers.

"A recent study from Gartner claims that customers are more likely to stick with a brand for a long time when their service expectations as met"

Your response time on social media to angry & frustrated customers can be pivotal to whether they stick with your brand or not.

What's The Average Social Media Response Time

Be it social media or any other medium, frustrated customers expect a reply at the earliest.

While most consumers expect a brand to respond in the first 24 hours, more than 39 percent of social media users expect businesses to reply within sixty minutes.

The response rate on social also varies a lot by industries. Sectors such as Legal, Real Estate, Finance, Recruiting are the quickest to reply to sectors such as Education & Sports.

The average response rate on social media for brands is 5 hours.

In short, consumers are expecting a reply within an hour, and the average response rate is 5 hours. So, how do you bridge this gap?

Tips To Speed Up Your Social Media Response Time

Here are some tips & best practices that will help you speed up your response time.

Use A Social Media Dashboard

Being a business, it's a given that you have to stay active across multiple networks, managing multiple profiles.

Daily you have to respond to messages, comments, questions, reviews, mentions, and much more stuff.

Well, if you want to be fast, you can't afford to spend too much time logging in and out of native platforms.

We recommend using a unified communication platform such as Statusbrew's Engage Inbox, which allows you to monitor your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube & Google My business conversations from a single dashboard.

And that's not it. You can bring your entire team on board & collaborate with your team members to respond to each conversation quickly.

Try out Statusbrew for your business, sign up right now & start your free trial.

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Automate Your Inbox

Inbox automation can help you manage inbound conversations a lot faster. You can use features such as comment filtering, private auto-replies, etc., to manage generic queries automatically.

If you're a Statusbrew user, you can use the Rule Engine to manage your conversations automatically based on the conditions you set and combat spam and trolls before they have a chance to ruin your brand's reputation.

For instance, set a rule to hide all the comments with spammy links on your ad posts or create a rule that assigns conversations regarding discounts to a team member managing sales for your business.

Triage Incoming Messages

To better organize inbound messages, use labels or tags to classify them.

Tags will help you quickly navigate between certain types of conversations. For instance, you can label all shipping-related queries with a Shipping-issues tag to make it easy for the logistics team to manage them.

Use Pre-Saved Replies For FAQs

The majority of the queries that reach us here at Statusbrew are pretty much the same. Our prospects are usually inquiring about the pricing information, so to avoid typing out the same response again & again, we've pre-saved our response, and now we can reply with just a single click.

Here's how Saved Replies work in Statusbrew.

We don't recommend using saved replies as an alternative to providing social customer care; there needs to a balance between speed & personalization.

For specific queries such as pricing information, product specifications, etc., you can use Saved replies so that you get enough free time to solve complex user queries.

Measure Every Thing

To ensure you're getting better with your social media response times, be sure you're tracking your average response time. Here are some of the metrics you need to track:

1. Total Number Of Replies
2. Median Reply Rate
3. Busiest Period For New Conversations
4. Stats By Team Member

Statusbrew's Engagement & Team Reports help you analyze how well your brand and your team respond to social messages. These metrics allow you to gauge your team's performance, discover opportunities to manage the team's workflow better, and allocate proper resources for unparalleled social care.

How Fast Are Your Responding To Your Customers On Social?

By following the tips mentioned above & using a social media management tool such as Statusbrew, you can vastly improve your social media response time without losing out on the personalization aspect.

Lastly, we'd like to know how fast is your social media response time. Do let us know in the comment section down below.

Infographic

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