6 Tips for Providing the Best Social Media Member Service

By JOHN FOLEY – July 22, 2016

Your social media profiles require attention. Attention beyond your marketing team posting links, updates, videos, and so on. Social media is all about engagement and interaction. But sometimes that interaction isn’t all light and goodness. You may have disgruntled members post negative comments. You may have confused prospects post misleading statements. With that being said, you need to have your team at the ready to handle issues as they pop up. Here are six ways your association can provide the best social media member service possible:

Have a strategy.

Have a strategy and make sure everyone on the team knows what that strategy is. There should be specific reasons for why you do things and how you do them. Having a strategy will also help you implement procedures later, as your social member service actions need to evolve. “Shooting from the hip” may work some of the times, but having a strategy and plan in place is vital in finding the most success on social media.

Have your procedures in writing.

Have your procedures in writing. It’s easier for things to fall through the cracks if you don’t have set, written policies and procedures for your team to follow. This goes along with having a strategy. But, make sure that strategy is well documented, not just something you have in your mind.

Be timely.

Social media is very fast paced and you need to keep up with that or you will seriously miss the mark. You need to have eyes on your social media platforms daily (better yet, hourly) in order to see what’s being posted or commented on so that you can respond as soon as possible. It helps to have the right social media management tool, like MAX or GrowSocially App, to improve your social listening and monitoring capabilities.

Be openly responsive.

If someone posts something on your social media profile page, then address it there. You can always take it somewhere private (direct messaging, email, phone, etc.) as well, but you want to show that you are on top of things, not only to the person who posted but to others viewing your social media profile. If you take it privately without addressing things openly first, then you appear to be unresponsive to the rest of your audience.

Empower your team.

Empower your entire team (or the majority) to respond without having to hold hands with management every step of the way. This is easy with the proper training and having policies and procedures in place. Your team should be trained using hypothetical situations and past issues. An emphasis should be placed on how response time is crucial. If your team is effectively monitoring issues but lacks the ability to respond, then what’s the point?

Don’t always engage.

Every so often a “troll” may come along just to stir things up. Your team shouldn’t be sucked into the crazy. You can either ignore a troll and delete/block the spam accounts, or just have a set answer that your team uses. In either case, you don’t want to feed the beast and continue some sort of silly “argument” with someone who is just there to cause trouble.

Your association’s main goal is to make and keep members happy, and this goal stands true for social media as well. If a problem or complaint arises with a member or prospective member on social media, take a deep breath, and remember these six tips to help make it right.