How to reduce the noise on Social Media without hurting customer engagement?
Social Media platforms are great to engage with your customers and get them involved in your company development while allowing them to express their opinion. Unfortunately, these platforms also generate a lot of noise and potentially create bad buzz. How can you reduce such noise while keeping customer engagement?
Since the early days of Social Media with MySpace (do you remember Tom?), people have enjoyed being able to share their thoughts and opinion publicly. Social Media gives everyone the possibility to have a large reach that was previously accessible only to an elite.
In 2007, Facebook becomes the new hot platform and soon after companies start using it to have a new way to reach out to their customers and prospects. (see the evolution of customer service channels over time)
The traditional vertical communication (from companies to consumers) quickly turned into horizontal communication and we acquired the amazing power of free-speech.
Happy and unhappy customers alike started commenting on posts and sending messages. Sometimes for positive or constructive feedback, sometimes for asking questions or recommending a service to friends, but very often to complain or add noise to the conversation.
The issue with Social Media noise
First of all, what do I mean by "noise"?
When a brand posts something on Social Media, depending on the popularity of the page, the average reach, the quality of the post, and whether it has been boosted or not, the number of comments may vary. Some posts can gather millions of comments.
But not all comments are equal.
Some are very useful and build customer engagement: questions, feedback, recommendations, etc.
Some can hurt and be very negative: complaints, aggressive messages, link to competitors, etc. (see what you should do with negative comments on Facebook)
And some are just plain noise. Messages like "Haha", "lol", "LMAO", "ok", "np", etc. bring nothing to the discussion but help increasing the reach to new networks.
Noise may seem harmless, but it does have an impact on any brand's business.
Since comments and messages can't be left unattended, brands must monitor and respond. Unfortunately, the more noise you get, the more messages you have to review, the more time and money it takes to manage.
Two solutions to reduce the noise
There are two things you can do to reduce the noise on your Social Pages and better manage comments and productivity without hurting your oh-so-important customer engagement.
Filtering your comments automatically
The "noise" I defined earlier is easy to identify.
An efficient method to reduce the workload necessary to manage all comments and respond quickly is to filter out everything that doesn't require a response. Comments such as "lol" don't require your customer service representative to respond anything.
If you manage to filter these messages out automatically, you will instantly reduce greatly the volume of comments to handle and therefore increase your productivity.
Adding Messaging to the channel mix
In 2010, Facebook Chat becomes Facebook Messenger and allows users to move from public conversations to private ones.
Similarly, Twitter offers Direct Messages, Instagram launches Instagram Direct, Google+ integrates with Hangout, etc.
For consumers, having private conversations means being able to talk about something they would not necessarily mention publicly or share confidential information (customer ID, phone number, email, etc.) and have a more direct and quick conversation with a brand.
For brands, adopting messaging channels (such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, WeChat, etc.) means a reduction of public comments, a lower risk of bad buzz, and a better quality of conversations to satisfy customers.
Offering a fallback private solution to every public channel can achieve all these while satisfying both parties.
Once you have these two methods deployed, you can improve your productivity and reduce the noise on your various pages without ever harming customer engagement.
Last update: 2025-02-16 Tags: customer service customer care customer engagement social media messaging