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In today’s time, all company owners are aware of the importance of social media to make a brand popular amongst its target audience. A great social media presence helps brands to make a mark no matter what the industry is. Social media chatbot here comes into the picture.
This social media presence has a different meaning for different companies, but one thing is always constant-we always want a prompt and effective customer experience. Social media chatbots can be a savior here. These bots offer the newest tools to facilitate excellent customer engagement, and many organizations already have started using them to get in touch with users in different innovative ways.
Are you thinking of incorporating chatbots in your customer support and marketing strategy? Guessing how your company can get benefitted from this new addition? In this blog, I will provide all the information related to social media chatbots. So, let’s dig in.
A social media AI chatbot is a software program that interacts with users on social media platforms. It can be used to answer questions, provide customer service and even convert customers.
In 2015, Telegram made a smart decision to integrate bots. After that, Facebook also made it available on its messaging platform. Now almost every messaging platform like Slack or WhatsApp are giving the option to add chatbots for serving customers in a better way.
Through the AI-based chatbot, you can now answer all your customer queries and engage with them on your company’s social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Viber, etc.
AI Chatbot assists in acquiring customers for your business by consistently interacting with them on social media platforms. Many companies have started using it for their business needs as the social platform has improved drastically due to the transformation of digital marketing.
Social media chatbots can also help in your sales conversion as with the natural language processing technology (NLP), it can understand customer queries and provide appropriate responses just like a real human agent.
Your customers can directly interact with the bots for any kind of assistance eliminating the long waiting time for email or call assistance.
Given the recent surge in the popularity of messaging apps and channels, it’s not surprising that chatbots are becoming more prevalent. We are getting used to these bots and so do the companies.
The chatbot is just like a loudspeaker, it has the capability to amplify the reach of your marketing efforts. This is true for your social media efforts too.
Using the social media chatbot can be hugely beneficial for both your company and the customers in different ways. It’s no surprise that by the end of 2022, it is expected that 80% of companies will be utilizing chatbots, as they offer many benefits.
Let’s see the key benefits now!
Let me describe one situation here that most of us have faced. Remember those frustrating moments when we deliberately search for some specific information on the company’s website, but we don’t spot it? Chatbots can be a great help here.
I often leave websites without making a purchase even though intended to because I am unable to find the required information and there is no assistance available. Integrating a chatbot in such cases comes as a great help.
We can easily ask the bot for assistance, and we will get it instantly. It gives us easy access to all the required information that we need to know to complete the buying process and even about the company.
The main usage of the social media platform for your business has to be getting more and more valid leads. If you are developing engaging content to attract users to your company website or some other landing pages, the chatbot can be a great help to convert those leads into valuable customers.
Drift reports that Chatbots assist 55% of businesses in generating high-quality leads.
One thing let me tell you. Customers don’t have the time to be formal. They will not write a long email to get an answer to a simple question, rather typing a text to the chatbot and getting an instant response will work for them.
An effective strategy is to use chatbots in coordination with email marketing, which can help to generate leads, taking advantage of the high conversion rates of chatbots.
Many chatbots can be integrated with your social media platforms and let you be there where your customers are.
Social media channels have become an integral part of our daily lives and a common means of communication for many of your customers. So, why don’t you connect them on their preferred channels?
Social media chatbots can be a great help here allowing you to offer instant assistance and engage with your customers on different social media platforms like Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, and so on.
The chatbot for social media platforms, not only helps you improve digital engagement, but you will also create a more seamless online experience for your customers, resulting in a mutually beneficial outcome.
One of the most important benefits of a social media chatbot is you can be available for your customers on social media platforms round the clock. Users can reach you any time, even after the operation hours.
As a result, any comment on social media channels will never be neglected. The bot will be always available for the customers to assist them. Apart from that, just like your website’s live chat assistance, where customer support agents assist the customers, the same level of customer support will be provided by the bots on your social media platforms too.
One of the best advantages of the social media platform is it helps companies to engage with their customers in a more personalized way. You can build a long-term positive relationship with them based on an emotional connection.
By deploying social media chatbot, you are offering another great way for customers to connect and engage with your brand. The chatbot provides instant support and information through the social media platforms your customers mostly use, thus offering more personalized experiences. It’s a great way to increase your customer retention and brand loyalty.
The chatbot automates your digital customer service. Not only can it help you save up to 30% on operational expenses, but also makes your social media customer service more efficient.
Social media chatbots automate many of your business operations including customer service, thus saving time and freeing the real support agents from additional workloads.
In fact, chatbots are capable of handling an entire customer interaction in 69% of cases. These are preconfigured to deal with different general FAQs and simple problem-solving capabilities. So, the bots can easily help customers by guiding them to get self-service if needed.
In the meantime, human agents get more time to handle complex questions and provide assistance to customers who require it more urgently.
Yes, a chatbot is a great medium to automate your customer support service. But when integrated with social media platforms, it works as an excellent digital marketing solution.
For example, social media chatbots can be used to promote the newest product launches, offers, and discounts, increase brand recognition and capture valuable leads for conversions.
Bots also help you to get an idea of your social media audience by collecting different data about their behavior and activities and provide valuable analytics and reports. This information will be highly valuable for implementing targeted digital marketing.
In short, a social media chatbot will allow you to integrate conversational marketing into your social media strategy, regardless of your approach.
Now that I have already discussed the benefits of social media chatbots, let’s focus on things more significant. Here I would like to discuss some great ways to use this social media chatbot and make the best out of it.
Yes, its true that adding a chatbot on your social media platforms will be beneficial for your company but you have to follow some steps to ensure the best outcome. So, let’s dig in.
Yes, it’s true that automated customer service is really helpful, but always remember that the chatbot should never completely replace the necessity of a human support agent. Rather, the chatbot on social media platforms should augment the real human customer support experience.
So, it’s very important that the chatbots should be capable of escalating complex issues to real support agents for providing better assistance. It means customers on social media platforms will always get assistance. If the social media chatbot is unable to process customer queries, it will transfer the chat sessions to your support team for better service.
There are several chatbot options available in the market to choose from, some are rule based and some are AI-powered. Both these two variants of chatbots have different capacities and serve different purposes.
A rule-based chatbot is configured with scripted responses from different knowledge bases, and it responds to customer queries based on the pre-set answers and decision trees. Here customers are asked to choose the replies from a set of keywords. This process is helpful in replying to simple queries.
On the other hand, the AI-powered chatbot is developed to interact with users in an interactive manner. With the help of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI chatbots can understand all customer inputs and provide accurate replies to their queries.
The AI-powered chatbot also remembers past interactions and learns from them to offer better service. So, if you want to offer more human-like customer support, then the AI-chatbot is the best option for your company.
A rule-based chatbot can still be a viable option if your goal is to increase efficiency and save some time for your support agents.
Ultimately, choosing the right kind of social media chatbot will depend on your business goals and requirements.
If you want to offer the best customer engagement on your social media channels, be proactive, rather than reactive. Here, proactive customer support will be your key to success.
You need to get in touch with the customers and initiate the interaction, rather than just sitting idle and expecting that customers will come to you and ask for help.
For instance, you can configure your social media chatbot to automatically send them welcome messages whenever customers land on your social media page. It is a friendly approach to let them know that you are always available for help.
Apart from that, you can configure the bot to proactively send them some promotional offers or discounts. This way, a social media chatbot can be a powerful tool for attracting customers and increasing conversions.
Please ensure that the social media chatbot can be accessed by all the customers irrespective of their languages and geographic locations.
A perfect multilingual social media chatbot should offer instant language translation options, automatic language detection and translation glosseries.
All these capabilities together let the chatbot engage with your customers from all around the world thus breaking out the language barriers. By expanding your customer base worldwide, you will have the chance to acquire new leads from overseas.
Make your social media chatbot attractive and enjoyable to customers and get the best out of your bot. How to do it? Create a chatbot with a compelling and likable personality.
It will also work as a bridge between real human agent and AI chatbot support, improving the overall customer experience. An unique and attractive chatbot personality is also an excellent way to be different from your competitors on the social media platforms.
Yes, you need to brainstorm a bit for creating such a persona. First find out answers to the below-mentioned questions.
Once you have answers, you will be able to create an excellent personality for your social media chatbot that not only will be attractive to your customers but also will help you to align with your business objectives.
It’s really important to collect and listen to customer feedback if you want to be successful in your business. Your social media chatbot is also not the exception.
A chatbot can be a valuable source of information about customer opinions and perspectives. So, configure your social media chatbot to ask customers for reviews and rate the experience.
Real-time and automated customer feedback helps you to understand how the social media chatbot is performing and what are the improvement areas. Your main objective here will be to offer excellent customer excellence and listening to customer feedback can be the secret to your optimal success.
Although the chatbot ecosystem has transformed for many companies, the objective remains the same: providing efficient, innovative, and convenient customer support.
Want to know about some innovative and widely used chatbot examples here? Then you are going to love this section.
Being one of the fastest growing digital marketing forms, WhatsApp is popular among most of the companies for various business needs. With the increased popularity of WhatsApp chatbot, more companies are now interested in adding it to their business strategies.
Typically, WhatsApp chatbot is created for businesses that wish to integrate conversational commerce within the secure WhatsApp platform.
Here is a list of benefits that an WhatsApp chatbot offers:
Instagram chatbots enable companies to provide more personalized shopping experiences, instant customer service and better customer engagement.
It is mandatory nowadays for Companies, and influencers to reply to a large number of messages on a daily basis, which are basically the same queries but from different people. If they take too long to respond to those messages, chances are that they may lose some valuable leads. Instagram chatbot comes here as the savior.
Here is a list of benefits that an Instagram chatbot offers:
On a monthly basis, Facebook Messenger makes millions of active users and for the last few years, the chatbot on Facebook messenger is getting really popular among various businesses. Many big brands and marketers use the Facebook chatbot for customer engagement and offering better service.
Most of us use Facebook messenger and use it to interact with brands. With the Facebook chatbot, companies can improve their response rate, allowing customers to receive information more easily via a platform they are already familiar with.
How to Get the Best Out of Facebook Messenger Chatbot?
A Telegram bot is essentially a Telegram business account. There is no such dedicated business app for Telegram. The bot lets you build a separate Telegram account for your company. Telegram business API or bot is free and allows you to interact with customers and run an online business successfully.
How to Get the Best Out of Telegram Chatbot?
REVE Chat is an omni-channel customer engagement platform for online businesses to interact with their customers on websites, mobile apps and other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Viber, Telegram and WhatsApp.
Apart from live chat assistance, REVE Chat also offers AI-powered chatbot to automate your customer service operations and offer 24/7 customer support. You can provide exceptional service to customers regardless of where they are and what channels they choose to interact with your business.
Integrated with most of the popular social media platforms, REVE Chatbot manages all comments and chat conversations on different social media channels from one place, making it easy to keep track of customer queries and respond in a timely manner.
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Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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