Using Social Media for Customer Feedback
Modern businesses strive towards becoming the most appealing to their target audience. The more your customers like your brand, the more engaged and willing to make a purchase they’ll be. That’s why so many businesses build their presence on social media and are actively communicating with their target audience, in order to gain feedback and gather valuable information from them.
The main reason is that social media platforms offer a way to engage a large number of people at once, as well as a way for businesses to gain insight into how those people perceive the business.
That helps businesses have a better understanding of their customers’ preferences, needs, and expectations, as well as their overall behavior. Moreover, the information gained from feedback can be used to improve business operations and customer experience. In addition, The more you know about your customers the more effective your future strategies and promotions will be. Here are a few ways to use social media to gain feedback from customers.
Table of Contents
Social listening
One of the best ways to find out what your customers think about your business is to track conversations across various social media channels. Online consumers oftentimes discuss their experiences with friends and family on social media networks. Moreover, they’re quite willing to write reviews and leave comments for future references. By tracking these mentions, you can gain insight into people’s opinions about your business.
You can also segment these mentions into positive, neutral and negative for your business. That way, you can track metrics to determine just how satisfied your customers truly are with your brand. Furthermore, tracking mentions will also give you an insight into what kind of content your audience wants, how to improve your customer service and how to make more strategic decisions for your products and marketing campaigns.
Survey your customers
The best way to understand your customers’ needs and expectations is to ask them directly about what they want. Online consumers have specific expectations and they are more than willing to let you know what those expectations are. In addition, they will openly say whether or not you’re managing to meet their expectations. However, directly asking your audience for feedback over social media can sometimes get chaotic at best. You’ll have tons of feedback at your disposal, but you’ll have difficulties sorting it all out.
Not to mention, determining if the comments are honest or not. That’s why you should consider opting for a more subtle approach. For instance, you can offer customers to conduct paid surveys online. That way you will give something of value to them in exchange for honest and reliable feedback. This will give you more in-depth information about what your customers think of your products or services, the content you provide and the experience they have with your brand, among other things.
Explore audience demographics
To understand how to appeal to your target audience, you must know who they are first. Also, you must explore their demographics and how they behave online. That way, you can tailor your offer to match their specific needs, as well as add personalization and customization to your promotions that will attract attention and drive engagement. For example, is your audience mostly male or female; are they older or younger; how much they earn on average?
Moreover, you need to explore what they do on social media, what kind of content they read, the influencers they follow, what they post and share, etc. That kind of information will help you position your business on social media as a source that can deliver as expected and meet the needs of your customers. What’s more, you can design campaigns and promotions that will surely capture your customers’ interest and encourage them to check out what you have to offer.
Test your future products
Many companies today, rely on their customers’ feedback for designing and developing future products. The main reason many brands to this is that no matter how familiar you are with your customers’ needs, there’s bound to be a feature that they might not like. That’s why it’s always a good idea to create a concept for future product or service and ask customers what they think about it.
The best thing about this kind of feedback is that your customers get to voice their opinions even before you actually start developing a new product. That way, you can redesign the product and improve upon it, based on the feedback gathered from your audience. Not only that but asking customers for feedback also improves your relationship with them. You show that their opinions matter to you and that you want to meet their needs. In return, you drive more engagement and loyalty from your customers.
Social media offers many great opportunities for businesses to grow, engage audiences and improve their marketing efforts. Aside from being business-friendly, social media platforms house a large number of people from all around the world. That makes gathering feedback that much easier. Not only can businesses make more strategic decisions based on feedback, but they can also improve their efforts to give their audience the best experience possible.
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Co-Authored With
Emma is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends.