Getting to Know You: Finding Time to Use Social Media for Customer Interaction

Social media is constantly touted as a must in any marketing strategy for one basic reason (which is not always explicitly stated): customer interaction.  The more you can connect with your customers, the more loyal they’ll be and the more the buy and the more they’ll recommend you and the faster your business will grow. 

The three platforms you’re told to use for all this wonderful connecting and interacting are Facebook, Twitter, and a blog.  So, you take the experts’ advice.   You’re using these platforms and things are going well.  People are posting comments, re-tweeting your tweets, sending you direct messages, and all that good stuff.  But you’re really busy and feel like you can’t keep up.  As far as problems go, this is a good problem to have.  You have two options to deal with it.

Option 1: Outsource

You can simply outsource the work to an intern, virtual assistant (VA) who has experience using social media, or a social media consultant.  Unless he or she is super savvy with social media, an intern or VA will probably need a fair amount of guidance before they can take over.  A social media consultant, on the other hand, will have a much shorter learning curve, and he or she will be able to show you (with numbers and testimonials) how they’ve helped other small businesses.  (Hint: The number of customer interactions should jive with an increase in sales.)

Option 2: Change the way you use social media

If you are disciplined, you can continue to interact with your customers on social media yourself.  All you need to do is put together a simple time management plan.

Here’s what you don’t do, which you might be doing now:

1. Ignore comments til they pile up and you’re overwhelmed.
2. Monitor comments all day long and reply to every single one immediately. 

Replying to comments is not an emergency, high-priority task.  It’s not a project that is due at the end of the day or a big new order that needs to be shipped overnight.  The people leaving comments are your customers and potential customers who also have other priorities.  If they really need to reach you, they will just call you.  But if you constantly disrupt your real work, it will take longer to complete the projects you are working on. Multi-tasking does not save time, even if you think it does. 

So here’s what you do instead:

Set aside two small blocks of time (15-20 minutes) every day (11:30am and 4:30pm, for instance) to monitor and reply to posts on Facebook, direct messages on Twitter, and comments on your blog.  So you don’t forget, schedule it on your calendar as a recurring event.  Some days it might take 10 minutes, and some days it might take 20 minutes.  But an average of a half hour every day is perfectly reasonable and doable.   Try it, adjust as necessary, and you should be good to go.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Marketing, small business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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