How to use social media for customer support

Whether it’s a viral TikTok, a helpful Facebook reply, or a timely Twitter response that defuses a customer complaint, social media isn't just optional for brands. In fact, the average person spends 2.5 hours per day browsing their favorite apps, which opens up a tremendous opportunity for brands to engage with their customers in the place they’re spending a good chunk of their time.

Here’s the thing: social media shouldn’t be reserved for marketing teams alone. Sure, using it to promote new products and reach new prospects is important, but social media can be used by customer support teams to ensure multiple touchpoints with the customer base.

Whether you’re looking for customer feedback, to de-escalate customer complaints, or generate brand awareness, social media is changing the game – and fast.

Before we get into it, let’s first establish how prevalent social media is in modern customer support as the numbers tell a pretty compelling story.

Research shows that 76% of customers now expect companies to offer customer service via social media, making it clear that social media has evolved beyond a marketing medium to become a critical component of comprehensive support. But it doesn’t stop there. McKinsey undertook a study which confirms this: forward-thinking organizations are increasingly integrating social media into their customer service strategies to provide holistic support.

It’s clear that social media channels have become essential touchpoints for customer interaction, but what are the biggest pros of incorporating socials into your support strategy?

Speed and accessibility

Whether it’s for personal or commercial use, there’s no denying that social media has revolutionized the way people connect with one another. Someone from Latvia can converse with someone in Laos in real-time, transcending the geographic boundaries that typically separate us. Being able to engage with people far away from you, in real-time, is a goldmine for businesses’ customer relationship management.

While telephone customer support enables this kind of immediate interaction, social media takes customer accessibility to a whole new level.

Phone support requires dedicated staffing during limited hours, typically Monday to Friday from 9 am to 6 pm. Another significant problem with phone-based customer support is the negative impact on customer experience from inherent wait times. These friction points not only frustrate customers but also create inefficiencies as support agents can only handle one call at a time.

In contrast, social platforms allow for immediate acknowledgment of customer concerns without these barriers. Support teams can monitor and respond to messages 24/7, even with limited staffing, by prioritizing urgent issues while quickly acknowledging others. This asynchronous yet responsive approach means customers receive immediate validation that their concern has been registered, even if the complete resolution requires additional time.

A single support agent can simultaneously monitor multiple social media conversations, acknowledge receipt of issues instantly with a quick reply, and then address them in order of priority – all while maintaining visibility to the wider customer base.

This immediacy is particularly valuable considering that customer expectations for prompt responses are remarkably high, with 72% of consumers expecting replies within 24 hours according to research undertaken by the University of Southern California.

Public accountability

The psychology of engaging with a brand account on social media is complex. Many people resort to seeking customer support via social media channels due to the accountability factor.

As mentioned previously, traditional customer support telephone lines mean customers can often navigate complex interactive voice response (IVR) systems with multiple menu options, only to then find themselves placed in a hold queue with uncertain wait durations or being passed between different agents without a shared record of their case. We’ve all probably experienced this at some point or other – it’s off-putting when you have an issue with a product that you want resolved quickly.

When support interactions happen in public forums, customers appreciate the transparency in problem-solving. This visibility creates an accountability mechanism that encourages brands to resolve issues efficiently and thoroughly. It also demonstrates to potential customers that your brand takes customer satisfaction seriously.

Multi-channel engagement

Your customers aren’t monoliths; different customers prefer different platforms. By establishing a presence across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other relevant platforms, you can meet customers where they already spend their time. (Remember how the average person spends 2.5 hours per day on social media?)

This multi-channel approach ensures that customers can reach out through their preferred platform rather than adapting to your company's preferred communication method.

Proactive issue resolution

Social listening tools allow support teams to identify trends in complaints and address issues before they escalate.

A study published by Asad Ayoub and Ayman Balawi of the University of Pécs emphasizes that social media's widespread accessibility enables companies to obtain valuable information about customer impressions related to their products or services. This proactive approach can prevent individual complaints from developing into larger reputation management challenges.

Even when your customers (and potential customers) aren't actively seeking support, if they see evidence of successfully resolved support conversations, they’ll be encouraged to confidently approach you with their own support queries, knowing they'll receive the same quality service.

Twitter/X

Having a Twitter (or X, as it’s known these days) is the ultimate platform for quick responses, real-time updates, and managing public complaints. What Twitter/X has always got right is its accessibility, partly owed to the platform's conversational nature, making it ideal for brief exchanges and immediate problem acknowledgment.

Research on Twitter customer service conversations has found that the type and location of certain dialogue acts significantly affect the likelihood of achieving desirable outcomes, such as customer satisfaction and problem resolution.

Facebook and Instagram

These platforms are ideal for direct messages (DMs), community engagement, and visual responses. Their messaging features allow for more detailed troubleshooting and private conversations when needed, while still maintaining the ability to respond publicly to comments on posts.

TikTok & YouTube

Perhaps lesser known for being used for customer complaints, these video-centric platforms are excellent for educational support videos, FAQs, and troubleshooting tutorials. For instance, customer support managers can take a screenshot from a tweet, or a support ticket query and answer that question on TikTok and/or YouTube. Visual demonstrations such as these can often clarify complex issues more effectively than text-based explanations.

When venturing into new mediums and channels shared with other teams, it’s best to have full transparency to avoid stepping on other departments’ toes. Right from the off, you need to ensure there’s crystal clear collaboration between the customer support and your marketing, social media and/or community management teams.

Without proper planning, teams may work in silos, causing delays or conflicting responses. To avoid this, you’d do well to establish roles and responsibilities for:

Managing social media inboxes
Responding to public comments
Escalating issues to tickets
Assigning responsibilities among team members

2. Offer support where your customers are

It's simple: be where your customers already are. While Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and LinkedIn form the core platforms for most businesses, don't overlook TikTok, YouTube or other channels if that's where your audience spends their time. Do your homework by tracking brand mentions, deploying listening tools, and engaging in industry conversations to identify the platforms deserving your attention.

Social listening extends far beyond catching your brand name in posts. It's about understanding patterns in customer feedback that reveal deeper insights:

Which complaints keep surfacing repeatedly?
When are your customers most active and vocal?
Which comments truly warrant responses?
Could existing knowledge base content resolve certain issues?

These insights help smartly allocate staff, develop self-service options, and determine which matters need taking offline. When support and social teams share these findings, you create a unified response approach that feels cohesive to customers.

Let's be real – manually tracking every social interaction can very quickly become overwhelming. Smart businesses invest in tools that integrate social monitoring with their customer support systems, creating a seamless experience that preserves conversation context across channels.

5. Track and manage customer support volume

You’ll know this by now, but social media support requests vary dramatically between businesses. To manage effectively, try using tech platforms that convert social inquiries into trackable tickets in your CRM.

These systems maintain conversational context from previous interactions, letting agents see the complete customer journey. If you’re starting out at this, we’d suggest you prioritize critical issues to maintain those all-important response times, ensuring urgent matters get addressed first while maintaining reasonable timeframes for all inquiries.

6. Use AI and automation

You’ll probably be sick to your back teeth of all the AI talk, but the AI revolution is truly here to stay. AI tools have transformed the 24/7 support landscape with capabilities like auto-responses during off-hours, chatbots for handling routine FAQs, and smart routing that connects customers with the right specialists.

But don’t worry, the beauty of automation isn't replacing human agents but enabling them to focus where their expertise truly matters – on complex, nuanced customer issues that build loyalty.

7. Equip customer support managers with the right tools

Your customer comms on social media will only be as good as the tools you provide your support managers. Your best bet is to centralize all social interactions in one dashboard, giving your customer support managers access to comprehensive customer profiles showing purchase and support history, and facilitate seamless collaboration on complex issues. Being able to depend on strong analytics will help massively.

8. Decide when to take conversations private

While public responses demonstrate accountability, certain scenarios call for private conversations: when personal information enters the picture, for multi-step troubleshooting exchanges, or when customer frustration intensifies.

Just remember: once resolved privately, acknowledge publicly that the issue was addressed – this reassures other customers watching from the sidelines.

9. Reframe negative feedback as an opportunity

The way you handle criticism can transform detractors into advocates. Instead of defensiveness, acknowledge concerns genuinely, offer actionable solutions, and always follow up.

In another study by McKinsey, it’s revealed that businesses responding effectively to social complaints see 20-40% increases in customer spending, while those ignoring them face 15% higher churn rates. The numbers speak for themselves.

Social media has a lot of pros going for it, but with that publicity comes quite a few dangers businesses will want to avoid.

1. Ignoring customer inquiries

This is a big no-no. Every direct question you get should receive a response. Not only will you dissatisfy the customer raising the query, but you could alienate other existing customers or even future customers who notice the lack of fulfilment. Whatever way you slice it, it’s no good: it’s bad on a customer experience front, and an optics front.

2. Deleting or hiding negative comments

Eeeek… this is also not advisable. Rather than hide all negativity, companies should instead address concerns transparently. What’s even more interesting is that 73% of consumers are actually willing to pay more for products if the companies guarantee total transparency. Of course, if they violate your community guidelines, then go ahead and hide them!

3. Being defensive

Even though social media communication naturally happens in real-time and is often informal, never compromise your professionalism. Your company's social media account is a window for future prospects to glimpse how you treat customers. When a complaint arises, responding defensively projects insecurity and immaturity rather than confidence in your product or service.

Defensive responses like "That's not our fault" or "You must have used it incorrectly" immediately creates an adversarial relationship instead of a collaborative one.

4. Providing excessive information

When responding to customer queries on social media, focus on clarity and brevity above all. Overwhelming customers with technical details or long policy explanations dilutes the effectiveness of your support and contradicts the quick-response nature of social platforms.

Instead, address the immediate concern concisely, then offer to continue complex conversations through more appropriate channels like DMs or email.

If there’s a widespread issue, say a product bug or outage, and you have a lot of customers tagging you in tweets or in the comments section of Facebook posts, try to avoid crafting individual responses to every affected customer. While you may want to provide tailored care, this instead stretches resources thin and creates inconsistent messaging.

It might be hard at first, but try to instead issue clear public updates that all customers can reference, establishing transparency while maintaining efficient communication.

Let's see these principles in action with a real-world example from Proposify, an online proposal software company that masterfully flipped a potential PR nightmare into a brand win.

Step 1: Acknowledge the issue

When Proposify experienced significant technical issues, an angry customer posted a sarcastic complaint on Twitter.

The company immediately responded by acknowledging the problem and offering support. This prompt acknowledgment demonstrated that they were listening and taking the customer's frustration seriously.

Step 2: Move the conversation to a private channel

While initially responding publicly to show accountability, Proposify’s CEO followed up with a comprehensive email to address the specific concerns in detail. This approach allowed for a more nuanced discussion while still maintaining the public acknowledgment.

Step 3: Provide a quick and transparent solution

In the follow-up email, the CEO:

Asked for clarification about the specific issue to ensure a targeted response
Transparently acknowledged product limitations
Outlined the development roadmap for addressing the problem
Set realistic expectations while maintaining confidence in future improvements

This transparency helped the customer understand both the current limitations and the company's commitment to improvement.

Step 4: Follow up

The CEO provided personal contact information for further assistance, ensuring the customer knew they had a direct line for any additional concerns. This gesture demonstrated ongoing commitment to the customer's satisfaction.

Step 5: Turn the experience into a learning opportunity

Beyond addressing the immediate complaint, the CEO established a human connection by mentioning a shared hometown. This personal touch transformed the interaction from a transactional exchange to a relationship-building moment.

The result? The previously frustrated customer became a brand advocate, publicly thanking ProsperSoft on Twitter. This powerful transformation demonstrates how effective social media support strategies can not only resolve problems but also strengthen customer relationships.

Key metrics to track

Okay, so you’ve got a customer support presence on social media – result. But now comes the next step, showing to those higher up that it’s paying off. To ensure your social media support strategy delivers tangible results, you need to measure what matters.

These metrics will give you the cold-hard data that’ll not only provide the clearest picture of your performance, but it’ll help solidify executive buy-in for customer support:

Response time

The time it takes for your team to acknowledge customer inquiries will directly impact customer satisfaction. With nearly three-quarters of consumers expecting responses within 24 hours, tracking and optimizing response times is non-negotiable.

Resolution rate

The percentage of issues resolved during the first interaction speaks volumes about your team's effectiveness and knowledge resources. A higher first-contact resolution tends to correlate strongly with customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. You’ll have experienced it first hand, right? When a customer gets answers without being passed around from pillar to post, or asked for a tedious follow up, they walk away impressed.

How to incorporate social media into your customer support strategy

Why social media is a MUST for customer support

The benefits of using social media for customer support