How should brands respond to Social Media?

If i understand the question correctly, Brands should;

• Use Social media to Understand and Engage with their Customers.

• Consider Social Media as an effective tool to Build their Brand and to Provide better Customer Service.

• Respond to Customer Inquiries and Comments that need Attention, Quickly and in less than twenty-four hours.

• Respond almost Immediately (If possible) with Helpful and Effective Solutions to Customer Complaints.

• They should always handle the Negative Comments in the right way, depending on the comment.

You should listen to social media conversations because people nowadays are much more open to one another and are willing to share experiences and exchange opinions. How can your brand benefit from that? You need to become part of these conversations! You want to generate leads and increase sales after all, right? Consumers today are not as “blind” as they were decades ago, and traditional advertising techniques are not as effective. People think that you, as a marketer or product owner, only want to sell them stuff and get their money. In order to make them buy your product, you need to make them believe in you. Hence, you need to know who these people are, what they like, how you can help them. This is exactly what social media monitoring helps you to do.  Using a monitoring tool can help you gain insights into what’s the opinion of your brand out there, for example, or who your thought leaders & influencers are – thus, you can establish stronger connections with them & use word of mouth more efficiently in your next campaigns. To see how this works in practice, you can check the features that Brand offers – it’s easy to use and it’s cost-efficient. Plus, you can start with a free trial to be convinced that it gives you good insights before committing.

A very famous Dell story is the best example of how negativity can trash your brand image. In, a blog post from an influential blogger about the dell’s pathetic customer service created a viral effect. Dell did not respond to the blog promptly, which lead to worsen situation, where lot of people started commenting on the blog and sharing their experiences about bad customer service from dell. By the time dell responded to the complaint, damage was done. Another example is of Nestle and Greenpeace. Where Greenpeace started a campaign against nestle, posting videos of how Nestlé, maker of Kit Kat, uses palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orangutans towards extinction. Nestle mismanaged the whole situation which created lot of negativity for the brand. Negative conversations are the part of social media, avoiding or deleting these conversation will only worsen the situation. Following are a set of rules or best practices which we follow while working with clients

1.      Never Ignore or Delete negative comment: Deleting or ignoring the comments will give out the very bad impression about the brand. This will only show how much you value your customer’s feedback. Deleting negative comments is strictly no no.

2.     Promptly acknowledge the feedback: Negative feedback need quick and prompt reply. In our case we never delay in reply to negative comments. Delay in acknowledging the feedback  may be taken as brand/business’s laid back attitude towards your customers

3.     Take the conversations offline:  We would always suggest taking the conversation offline. Your first response should be public. Then you can take it forward as a private conversation. Send them message on email. This will also give a personal touch.

4.     Appreciate the feedback:  Making customer feel like a king will always help you in building strong bonding. Appreciate their feedback and Make them feel that their feedback has helped your brand in becoming better.

5.     Create positivity: Through excellent customer experience Change the negative conversation to the positive one through customer service. Provide them best of customer service which will help you in getting the positive words about the business.

6.     Stay connected to the customer: Keep track of all the developments happening on the issue. Stay connected to the customer, until they are satisfied with the result.

Negative comments might irate you sometimes but be calm. Try to be positive. These types of conversations do not always harm your brand. If tackled properly they can lay a strong foundation of customer relationship.

I will go further and after Marwa t's answer I will say that brands need to respond on social media platforms exactly how they are promoting themselve. So if a brand promote itself as a fun and enthusiastic partner it have to respond like a fun and enthusiastic friend. If you are promoting yourself as a fun and full of life brand and you respond to your customers like a bold person you destroy your identity. So act and respond like you promote yourself if you want to be a successful brand.