Add a Social Customer Service Strategy to your marketing toolkit

We are all aware of the power of social media and now you can add a social customer

the changing use of social customer service

service strategy to your marketing toolkit.  When faced with small problems or wanting to know more, purchasers are now looking to the internet for snippets of information. This is happening in many ways such as asking direct questions in sites such as Yahoo answers, watching You Tube videos, tweeting or questions on Linkedin, Facebook etc. I’ve watched my teenage children do this many times and now it seams as though the age demographic of those looking for answers is shifting. In an interesting article on ‘Social Customer Service Becoming More Widely Used‘ Drew Bowling states  ‘In fact, nearly 1 in 5 adults 45-to-54 years old asked about a problem on a Q&A site and over 1 in 4 adults 35-to-44 year-olds said they’ve watched a video tutorial on YouTube or a company website’. 

Why a social customer service strategy

He further writes on why this is happening

Honestly, who can blame anybody for turning to the internet as the first-response method to solving a customer service problem? Nobody wants to dig through an owner’s manual, locate a corporate hotline, and then go through a vexing menu of automated recordings only to finally talk to a living-and-breathing customer service rep just to be put on hold. Resorting to the internet’s brand of semi-self-help social customer service is usually a faster and likely easier way to locate a good answer since some of the people you’d be asking are those who have experienced the very problem you’re looking to solve. Click here to read the full article, be sure to view the info graphic on the changing landscape of social customer service.

So, you are probably wondering what is means to you as a small business owner? The article got me thinking about how can I use this information on the changing landscape of social customer service in my small business to create a social customer service strategy. In order to lift my online profile and take advantage of the ‘free advertising’ component of the web I can answer questions related to my business and leave a link to my website in the answer. I can post you tube videos covering the basics on products that I sell, again with links to my website. I can ask customers, what issues they have had in the past and turned to the net to solve, and can I provide the answers, I can also have Q & A’s on my website.

The goal with this social customer service strategy is to  build my business profile, so that  it will turn me into an expert, an authority and provide an opportunity for me to gain new customers.

However, there is a proviso, do not get distracted away from other money making activities in your business, you still need to be selective with how your spend your time.