Kseniya I. Content Marketing Expert

How brands communicate with the audience in social networks

Social media presence and friendly relations with customers can increase brand loyalty, attract new audiences, and even help you find fresh ideas for further development. However the communication on the official pages of brands is not always cloudless. You must always be ready for criticism and hate, constantly be in touch and try to maintain your “voice” and reputation in any situation.

The main problems of brands in social networks

Boring content and formal style

Any step outside of the usual can be dangerous. Company management understands this, so sometimes specialists have to persuade brand owners to experiment for a long time. The easiest way to do this is to show the ineffectiveness of current publications and low user engagement.

It is quite possible to do something interesting without risking your image. It is worth trying to connect engaging formats, for example, games, stories, masks, etc. As for the responses to comments (both negative and positive), the style of communication here will depend on the target audience. The jokes of a youth brand in the comments will look more appropriate than jokes from real estate companies.

Comments are turned off

Social networks were created for communication. By disabling the ability to comment on posts, you show a reluctance to interact with users. In addition, there may be doubts about the purchase of your product. The logic can be as follows: since the company turns off the comments, then if the issue with the product arises, the brand won’t get in touch.

No response to comments

Regardless of whether users leave positive or negative comments, everyone needs a response. There are times when brands notice only “problematic” messages, and there is no time left to respond to praise, gratitude. It is wrong. Without receiving a response, the client simply won’t write a good review next time.

Removing negative feedback

Handling negativity is an art. Deleting a negative comment is a bad decision. Firstly, the user can write comments from other accounts and talk about the fact that on your pages they do not allow telling the truth. Secondly, you may lose a client. This is especially important if we are talking about small businesses.

There are many examples when an initially negative client changed his mind to a positive one after his problem was promptly resolved. Some users after that can also write a second (but already positive) review or make a mention.

The brand does not have its own "Tone of Voice"

Almost all posts in such cases are written in an informational style, without engaging the user in a dialogue and without demonstrating the values ​​and principles of the company. To get an emotional response from the audience, you need to share the life of the company, its plans, ideas and projects in terms of benefit for the client (or even for the world as a whole). That is why it is worth considering a clear Tone of Voice description of your brand.

Tone of Voice is how a brand communicates with its audience: vocabulary, sentence structure, communication style, and so on. The “voice” of the company should be different from other brands and reflect the personality and values ​​of the brand.

Tone of Voice manifests itself in

- texts on the site;

- social media posts;

- email newsletters;

- responses to comments and messages;

- in communication with sales managers, etc.

Large brands create detailed instructions for employees, where they prescribe all the details: from general rules of communication to the rules for writing numbers and using emoji.

A company of any size can create such a guideline, and it will greatly facilitate the work. Communication with users will become more thoughtful and logical. The company will save itself from the situation when the response to the client’s email comes in too official style, and the message in direct is answered with jokes and emoticons.

How to respond to messages faster?

This is one of the most pressing questions when it comes to communicating with a brand on social media. Users want to get a reaction to their comment immediately, as social networks and online communication in general have accustomed us to this format of instant communication.

The maximum response time to a comment, message or mention of a brand is a day (the same amount of time “lives” for stories on Instagram, where users often like to leave negative feedback). If you reply to a comment later than 24 hours, then there is a chance of incurring more anger and a new wave of negative comments from the same user.

It is worth bearing in mind that social networks also take into account the average response time and display this information on community pages.

What to do to quickly respond to comments:

Prepare in advance answers to the most frequently asked questions/complaints.

Surely you have accumulated a database of the most frequent questions and complaints (we hope that there are not very many of them). It will be helpful to prepare draft response options in advance and agree with management and other departments if necessary. You do not need to respond with templates and the same messages. The main thing is to understand the essence of the problem and what solution you can offer.

Use services to monitor brand mentions.

It’s impossible to quickly track feedback from users in a different way. Most services can search for mentions not only on social networks, but also on marketplaces, recommendation and review sites, industry and regional forums, and even recognize brands in photos.

Another pro of using such services is the ability to analyze the effectiveness of work: how the tone of messages has changed, how many positive and negative comments users have left, etc.

Try to automate the work with comments.

This method is not for any case, since users usually rely on an individual approach and communication with the brand in the format of a dialogue on an equal footing. In addition, situations and problems of the client may be non-standard. And most importantly - this method is not suitable if you have chosen a friendly communication style.

It often happens that work in social networks is given to chat bots. This is more about support chats, but, nevertheless, this also happens on social networks. The main advantage here is that the user receives an almost instant response. The con is that it is not always possible to solve the problem in this format. That is why it is better to use a chatbot separately, and still respond to comments by community managers.

Hire experts to respond to comments.

If there are too many comments, then one SMM expert will not cope with them. Sometimes even a few people can't do it. Analyze the situation, the average response time, the workload of community managers. In some cases, hiring employees to quickly respond and work with comments can cost the brand less than a damaged reputation and a disgruntled audience.

Conclusion

Even 20 years ago, it was difficult to imagine the communication between an ordinary consumer and a large corporation. Today, social networks provide an opportunity for everyone to involve the public in solving the problem. Sometimes one incident can significantly damage the brand's reputation, lead to thousands of reposts, memes, comments, and even protests and harassment of the company online. A well-thought-out policy of communication with users in the comments, a well-developed tone of voice and, most importantly, an understanding of your audience will help protect the company from communication failures.