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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Guide

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Media monitoring helps organizations stay informed about what’s being said across online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, and other media channels. Whether you're tracking brand mentions, measuring PR performance, monitoring competitors, or identifying emerging trends, our expert guides, best practices, and industry insights will help you build a smarter media monitoring strategy and make more informed communications decisions.

Discover expert media monitoring guides, best practices, and industry insights to track brand mentions, monitor competitors, and stay ahead of the news.

Media Monitoring: Guides, Best Practices & Industry Insights

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.

Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?

The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

How do customers interact with my newly launched product?

How do I increase the productivity of my employees?

How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?

We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.

So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.

But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!

But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.

We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

AI adoption is no longer the challenge—trusted context is. Most organizations have AI tools, but many still rely on disconnected, stale, or unverified data, limiting the quality and trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs. Meltwater MCP brings trusted, real-time intelligence into AI assistants.

Your Best Context is Already in the Room

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIn to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

For B2C brands, delivering social media customer service has become a necessity, as consumers have grown to expect businesses to respond to their queries and complaints through popular social channels. This expectation has also spilled over into the B2B world, so it’s often a good idea for brands that sell to other businesses to offer some level of customer care through social media. 

While it’s something brands should do as good practice, companies using social media for customer service will find that it provides a lot of additional benefits beyond simply making customers happier. The most immediate benefit is that it enhances your brand reputation by demonstrating your commitment to customer care in a transparent, public channel.

The rewards of a good brand reputation cannot be overstated, it’s something that all marketers work very hard to achieve. This in itself will lead to increased customer retention and stronger word-of-mouth referrals.

Social media customer service can also cut costs by either solving customer issues with fast responses or directing them to self-serve online resources, it reduces the pressure on your customer support team. What’s more, all of the data generated by tracking and responding to customer queries and complaints on social media channels can provide valuable insights into your customer preferences, needs, pain points, and trends, which can help you improve your product and service offerings.

But getting customer service right on social media can be challenging. For a start, it’s often the case that customer service and social media are two completely separate functions within a business, so they need to be aligned and working together seamlessly. Meltwater's social listening solution, Explore, is ideal for customer service as they are designed to help you identify and respond to customer comments on social media, no matter how big your organization. With the Salesforce Social Studio sunset, Meltwater integrates easily with Salesforce, so that customer queries raised on social channels can be effortlessly synced with the platform that your customer service department is likely to be using.

Below we’ve collected some real-world social media customer service examples from a wide range of different brands, to highlight the challenges they face and how they respond:

Domino’s Pizza is one of the world’s best-known fast-food brands, with millions of hungry customers ordering pizzas to be delivered every single day of the year. So it’s no surprise that the company’s social media channels are bombarded with questions and complaints because with an operation of that scale, it’s inevitable that a small percentage of deliveries won’t meet customer expectations.

The company clearly treats social media as an important customer service channel, with every query receiving a response that attempts to resolve the problem. Each message is responded to with a clear answer advising the customer of the best next step, whether that might be moving to a more detailed conversation in DMs, or escalating to the company’s online complaint handling system.

The customer is given the name of the rep dealing with their query, so that they can see a level of accountability, and a reference number enabling the case to be tracked accurately throughout the handling process.

Tip: Read our Domino’s Customer Story and learn how they use Meltwater to improve their social media operations.

South Korean auto brand, Hyundai, is the next customer service example on our list. The company is the third largest car manufacturer globally in terms of production volume and sells its vehicles in almost every country in the world. Cars are a big ticket item for most consumers, and will often represent the most expensive purchase people make other than their home, so it’s a topic that consumers not only research in great detail but also have very strongly held opinions about. 

Customers sharing negative comments and experiences about the brand on its social media channels can have a big impact on sales because nobody wants to risk spending tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle that has a poor reputation. So it’s easy to understand why Hyundai USA makes a point of quickly responding to queries, complaints, and even negative comments posted on social media.

In this example, the poster seems to be making a general comment about the quality of Hyundai cars, rather than raising a specific issue that he needs help with, but the brand still makes the effort to assist him and resolve the problem. 

Tip: Read our Hyundai Customer Story and learn how they are using Meltwater's social listening suite to better understand what consumers are looking for when it comes to electric cars.

As one of the world’s most widely used money transfer service providers, Western Union is relied upon by millions of people to send money to friends and family wherever they are in the world. That’s an important service, and the company’s customers depend on it to work perfectly every time.

When customers encounter difficulties with the service, they need to know they can get quick and reliable support from Western Union. The company delivers comprehensive social media customer service, responding to all queries and complaints, whether they’re concerning specific issues a customer needs help with, or more general comments about how the service works. 

Tip: Read our Western Union Customer Story to learn how Meltwater helps the company truly understand not just the outputs and outcomes but also the impact of messages on social media.

Every morning, millions of people around the world start their day with Kellogg’s breakfast cereals, but sometimes customers are left a little disappointed. Maybe their cereal isn’t up to the usual high standards they expect from Kellogg’s, or maybe they’re just struggling to find their favorite product. Whatever the issue, the brand is always on top of social media customer service, making sure that customers get answers to their questions and any problems are resolved professionally. 

With a brand like Kellogg’s, it’s unlikely that many of the issues raised on social channels are urgent or even particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless, the company understands the importance of keeping its customers happy. By demonstrating a commitment to social media customer service, Kellogg’s is safeguarding its brand reputation. 

Not all social media customer service examples are about responding to complaints and negativity, sometimes your brand just has a lot of fans with a lot of feedback. Vans is a sneaker company with a pretty big cult following, and those fans are always keen to let the company know how they feel about the latest designs on its social media channels.

Vans does a great job of letting its fans know that it’s listening to their ideas and feedback, and if you take a look at the brand’s social channels, you’ll see it responds promptly to any questions.

Read our Vans Customer Story and learn how Meltwater helps the sneaker company support successful event execution, connect with influencers, generate reports, and measure ROI.

Brands don’t come any bigger than Coca-Cola, and the company’s social media channels boast some of the largest audiences in the world. While that’s a great place to be for any B2C brand, it does come with its own challenges, namely the huge volume of queries and complaints posted on the company’s owned social channels every single day. 

Coca-Cola rises to this challenge admirably, effectively responding to all queries across its broad range of international social media channels, showing customers that it cares about their problems and concerns. In this case, we see an example of the company effectively directing a customer to an online resource that provides further information about the problem they have encountered. 

It would have been easy to simply ignore this complaint since it is not requesting immediate support, but instead, Coca-Cola shows that it’s listening to its customers and takes their concerns seriously. This is one of the reasons it’s such a powerful brand. 

For luxury hotel brands like W London, it’s essential to maintain a reputation for impeccable service quality, since that’s at the very heart of their offer to customers. So when somebody publicly complains about the level of service they received, the brand needs to be seen to be doing everything possible to ensure the customer receives a satisfactory outcome. 

As we can see in this example, W London monitors its social channels for any complaints and swiftly escalates the complaint to a private discussion in DMs. This is especially important in this situation, where the customer has a complaint relating to a personal health-related issue, which should not be discussed on a public channel.

Tip: Read our W Hotels Customer Story and learn how Meltwater helps them connect with customers on a personal level, get an insight into the guest experience, and measure ROI.

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing/email marketing automation platform, used by millions of small and medium businesses around the world. As with many technology brands, the company has to handle a lot of tech-support queries through its social channels, as well as the regular complaints and queries that most B2C brands will be familiar with. 

This requires an additional layer of training for the social media customer service team since they need to be able to provide customers with the most appropriate technical answers as well as being able to handle complaints and queries. The benefit to the business is that in many cases, such as in this example, the query can be answered quickly and easily, which reduces pressure on the tech support team and saves the customer time. 

Safely flying your customers and their luggage around the world is not without its challenges, as any airline employee knows. Passengers can run into all kinds of difficulties which require support from the company. Booking problems, delayed flights, and, as in this example, lost luggage, are just a few of the problems that airline customer service teams have to deal with.

Air travel can be a stressful thing for a lot of people, and it’s understandable that they might want to take to social media to voice their complaints. The social media customer service team needs to provide timely help in a calm and professional manner to reassure the customer that their problem will be dealt with. In this social media customer service example, the Air France team has responded to the customer, requested further information in order to progress the case, and provided a couple of options for the customer to contact customer services directly with their details.

Tip: Read our Air France Customer Story and learn how the company uses Meltwater to monitor traditional and social channels to ensure accurate, up-to-date information, measure and report on major crises, work to mitigate any negative impacts, and identify and target influential sources writing about aviation and air travel.

Puma is a popular sportswear fashion brand, and it’s important that the company maintains a reputation for high-quality products. When a customer publicly complains about a pair of running shoes falling apart while still relatively new, there’s a risk of its reputation being tarnished, so it’s vital to respond to that customer and resolve the issue. 

In this social media customer service example, we can see that Puma has not only replied to the customer privately via DM, but also publicly noted this so that other customers can see the company is responding and fixing the problem. 

Tip: Read our Puma Customer Story about how they are using Meltwater to engage users in over 80 countries, track unique uses of campaign hashtags, and obtain a 24x higher than average engagement rate.

Learning from Social Media Customer Service Examples

When customers have complaints or questions about your brand on social media, it’s just good business sense to respond quickly and positively. You won’t be able to resolve every single issue all of the time, and often you’ll need to direct the customer to your conventional customer service channels, but nevertheless, showing that you are responsive and helpful to customers on social media can earn your brand a lot of goodwill.

If you’re ready to start delivering social media customer service that will make customers love your brand, Meltwater Engage is the best solution to get it right. Contact us today for a demonstration of how it can work for you.

10 Social Media Customer Service Examples to Learn From

When you have a disappointing experience with a company, do you ever take to social media to voice your dissatisfaction? You’re not alone. It’s estimated that 67% of consumers use social media to complain directly to brands, and it’s easy to understand why. 

Why Is Social Media Customer Service Important?

What Are the Advantages of Social Media Customer Service?

What Are the Disadvantages of Social Media Customer Service?

How To Create an Effective Social Media Customer Service Strategy

What Are Social Media Customer Service Best Practices?

How To Improve Your Social Media Customer Service with Meltwater

People know that emails often get ignored and nobody wants to waste their time on hold to a call center, but if you complain on social media, your grievance is visible to the whole world. Companies are likely to be more motivated to help you quickly, demonstrating their great customer service to other potential customers.

Even though social media has become the preferred channel for customer complaints, businesses are allowing a third of all complaints to go unanswered despite the obvious risks of leaving unhappy customers without a response.

And it’s important to remember that customer service isn’t just about fielding complaints. Potential customers will often use social media to make enquiries during the consideration phase of the customer journey, because they hope it will be the fastest way to get an answer from the brand. Failing to respond to a consumer who is actively asking questions about your products is leaving cash on the table.

So, for many businesses, implementing a robust social media customer service strategy could be an easy win, improving customer experience and retention while working magic for their brand reputation. Before putting a strategy in place, it’s worth focusing on why exactly people complain on social media. Sure, the most obvious answer is that they see it as the speediest path to a resolution for their problem, but there are other, more surprising motivations.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology looked into this very question, and here’s what they found: 

To bond with others who have experienced the same issues. A problem shared, as they say, is a problem halved. 

To get a self-esteem boost. Complaining about others can make us feel better about ourselves.

So, when thinking about your approach to social media customer care, it’s important to understand that there are sometimes other drivers behind a complaint beyond the need to get the problem fixed, and that can often cause people to use more negative language than necessary.

In the simplest of terms, social media customer service is just customer service delivered via social channels as opposed to more conventional mediums such as telephone or email. In practice, it’s a complex activity with lots of different elements that need to be considered.

First of all, there’s the question of how you actually identify complaints and enquiries on social media, when they can appear on any one of a growing number of platforms, and they might not directly tag your company profiles. To do this effectively, especially at scale, you need a third-party social listening solution like Meltwater Explore.

Engagement is also important. Not every social post that mentions your brand will require a customer service level response, in many cases a simple acknowledgement by way of a like or short comment will be enough. Again, a third-party social media management and engagement solution can facilitate this. 

The mechanics of identifying and responding to queries and complaints are only the beginning. The big issue is how to ensure a high standard of social media customer service is delivered using these tools, as there is a wide variety of issues that will need to be dealt with, for example: 

All of these issues have to be quickly assessed and then dealt with in the most appropriate manner. Do they need to be directed to some online resource that can provide help, or escalated to the support team? Can the social media team resolve the issue themselves, or do they need to obtain more information from the customer before progressing the enquiry? Should the rest of the conversation take place on the social channel where the customer instigated it, or does it need to be moved to another communications medium?

For large organizations, close integration between the social media team and customer support team will be essential, and often this means that the software platforms used to manage customer service and social media need to be integrated as well, so case details and progress can be passed seamlessly between them. Meltwater integrates with Salesforce, for precisely this reason. 

Social media customer service also plays a key role in crisis management, because disgruntled customers on social media can quickly snowball into a bigger problem, especially if the customer has a large social following. So as well as generally striving to respond to all customers on social, paying close attention to any complaints that are gaining visibility is important. 

It’s clear that social media and customer service come together to create a complex problem which can be difficult to tackle. It requires the right social media customer service software, well-trained staff, and a process of constant improvement. To achieve this, in-depth analytics and regular reports are used to measure how well the whole system is working, and where improvements can be made.

Tip: Take a look at these social media customer service examples to get inspired.

Delivering excellent omnichannel customer service (just like an omnichannel customer experience) is something that most businesses should aim for, because it’s an essential part of building a powerful brand. But the role of social media in customer service has become vital for a number of reasons.

Firstly, for better or worse, we live in a world where consumers simply expect businesses to be available and responsive on social media. Failing to meet that expectation leads to customer dissatisfaction, ultimately damaging their perceptions of your brand. All other things being equal, if your competitors are delivering great social media customer service and you are not, they have an advantage over you.

It’s not just a matter of customers being over-entitled either, it’s about accessibility and convenience. People have complicated lives, and the conventional customer service channels might not always work well for them, so being able to reach out to your business via a channel of their choosing, at a time that works for them, means a lot.

Don’t forget, what’s good for customers is good for you. By actively responding to customer queries and problems on social media, your company is very publicly demonstrating its values, showing the rest of the world that it takes customer satisfaction seriously.

In its own way, this is very powerful PR for your brand. It should come as no surprise that customers who enjoy a positive experience of social media customer service are far more likely to become repeat customers, and brand advocates. 

At the same time, all of these comments, complaints, and queries in social media can provide a valuable source of consumer intelligence and customer intelligence. Are similar issues and questions coming up regularly? Perhaps a new topic is suddenly being mentioned or asked about a lot.

By analyzing this data, businesses can gather information about customer preferences, pain points, and needs, which can be used to improve products and services. What’s more, all of the data gathered through social media customer service operations provides a lot of consumer insights and intelligence that will add rocket fuel to your marketing campaigns.

If you get social media customer service right, it can also reduce costs in a big way. Think about the time and resources expended every time a complaint or query goes through your customer service department. Much of that overhead can be eliminated with a smart social media customer care strategy, either by providing quick resolutions to common issues directly through the social channels, or deflecting them to self-service resources where they can resolve issues by themselves.

Let's take a look at five advantages of social media customer service:

Accessibility and Convenience
Offering customer service through social channels makes life a lot easier for your customers, empowering them to get answers to their questions and solutions for problems in a quick and convenient manner that suits them.

Reduces Costs
Responding to customers on social media can reduce the overall cost of customer service delivery, giving people quick resolutions or directing them to self-serve resources, so that fewer cases are passed to the customer service department.

Builds Brand Equity
By delivering excellent customer care in social media, your business is proving that it puts customers first in the most visible way possible. People can see that if they have a problem with any of your products or services, your company can be trusted to put it right.

Data and Insights
Social media customer service produces a lot of data about your customers and their relationship with your brand and products. This data can be harnessed in different ways to generate insights that could lead to improved products and better-targeted marketing campaigns.

Crisis Management
Many potential crises can be averted entirely by swiftly responding to customer service issues raised on social media. In the event that a brand crisis does begin to blow up, social media customer service can help mitigate it by quickly answering questions, addressing misinformation, and reassuring customers that your business is handling the problem.

Let's take a look at five disadvantages of social media customer service:

High Visibility
While showing off your commitment to customer service in public can be a positive, things are also very visible when they don’t go so well. For example, your team might struggle to placate a particularly upset customer, or to resolve a difficult issue. In these situations it’s important to escalate quickly and resolve the issue as soon as possible. 

Volume of Requests
For larger brands especially, the volume of requests for customer service in social media can be huge, making it an unwieldy problem to handle. The problem can be addressed with the right social media customer service tools, which will make managing the volume much easier, but also appropriate staffing levels and well-planned processes.

Trolling 
A common challenge for social media managers is dealing with trolls in their owned channels. This can take many shapes, from harmless jokers trying to have a little fun at a brand’s expense, to more vicious attacks from people who possibly have some real or imagined grievance. Appropriate training and processes are the best way to deal with this. 

Operational Silos
When a business begins to offer social media customer service, there’s a risk of a disconnect between that team and the existing customer service function, so you end up with two teams working at cross-purposes. Integrating your social media management solution with your CRM platform (e.g. Salesforce) is a good way to tackle this. 

Customer Expectations 
When communicating with a brand via social media, customers can often expect a much faster response than they would after using an email or online form for a similar request. Depending on your resourcing, this can be unrealistic. Set expectations in your support channel profile, stating hours of operation and typical response times.

Hopefully by now we’ve convinced you that social media customer service is something that can give your business a strong advantage, but also given you an understanding of the numerous challenges that need to be addressed in order to do it well. 

So how should you go about mapping out a social media customer service strategy?

As with any kind of strategizing, the first and most important task is to define your goals and objectives. We’ve already outlined the benefits of customer service in social media. Do you need to improve service response times, increase customer satisfaction, enhance your brand's reputation, or all of the above? What social media metrics will you use to measure progress towards those goals?

The second stage of your strategic planning should be to build a clear understanding of your audience in social media. Which channels are they most likely to use, and what topics do they typically discuss in relation to your business?

Good social media monitoring tools like the Meltwater will help you do this easily.

Get a free tour of our platform today to understand how we can help you advance in your social media customer service strategy!

Next you need to allocate the appropriate resources. This includes the right social media customer service software platforms, the right staff, and training where necessary.

But remember that this resource should not exist in isolation and, assuming you already have a fully functioning customer service team, you should work out how these two teams will work together to deliver optimal results.

Develop a triage system so that the frontline social media team understands what kind of queries it can respond to directly, when they should escalate to a different team, and what that escalation procedure looks like. As you build this plan, bake in reasonable Service Level Agreements for different types of engagement, so everybody understands what response times they should be aiming for.

It’s important to understand that your social media customer service team will be representing your brand in a very public arena. Clear policies and guidelines for how they should interact with customers on your brand social channels need to be developed and properly documented, and all staff should be trained extensively, with regular scheduled refreshers.

It’s also a good idea to develop a broader social media branding guide as well as an employee social media guideline for how staff talk about the business on their personal social media profiles.

As you create policies and guidelines, be sure to include planning for crisis scenarios. The team should be able to identify the early warning signs of a potential crisis, using a social media listening tool like Meltwater, and be fully trained in how to manage those situations. There should be a clearly established ‘chain of command’ so that when a difficult, fast-developing problem arises, there’s no question about roles and responsibilities. Everybody should know what part they have to play, and who has the authority to make decisions.

Finally, pay attention to legal and regulatory requirements for all of the countries your brand operates in, with regard to privacy, data protection, and any other relevant considerations. An enterprise-grade social media engagement solution like Meltwater can help streamline this.

While all of this might sound challenging, the good news is that social media customer service has been around for long enough for early adopters to learn the hard lessons on behalf of everybody else. So other businesses can benefit from their experience. 

Here are some best practice tips to employ in your own social media customer service efforts.

Be responsive: People tend to use social media as a customer service channel because they want a quick response, so even if you can’t provide a full resolution straight away, at least acknowledge that they’ve been heard and will get an answer soon.

Use a professional tone: It can be tempting to use a casual tone on social media, but remember to stay in your brand voice and keep things business-like and avoid over-familiarity, as this can annoy customers, especially if they have a complaint.

Be discreet when necessary: Providing positive customer experiences in a public channel is good, but when things aren’t going well, or sensitive topics are involved, it’s often better to move a discussion to a more private channel.

Know your business: Make sure your social media customer service team is kept up to date on the business and its products, so they can more readily understand customer concerns and offer better support. 

Set clear expectations: Communicate expected response times and next steps with customers. If a resolution will take time, make sure they have a realistic estimate of how long they can expect to wait. 

Maintain consistency: Ensure that your customer service interactions are consistent in tone and style across different social media platforms. This helps position your brand as one that is reliable and dependable. 

Keep up to date: The world of social media is constantly evolving, with new platforms emerging and growing their own audiences. Make sure you periodically take stock of where your customers can be found online, and whether there are conversations about your brand that you might not have spotted. 

Embrace feedback: Encourage customers to provide feedback on their social media service experiences. Use this feedback to improve your processes and social media customer service strategy.

Improve constantly: Use data and analytics to monitor the performance of your social media customer service team. Identify bottlenecks and weak-points, or areas that need better resourcing. 

Look after your team: Don’t underestimate the emotional toll of spending all day dealing with unhappy, sometimes angry customers, while maintaining a calm and professional demeanor. Celebrate success, check in on your team regularly, make sure they have the support they need to do a great job.

Building a strong social media customer service strategy can deliver huge rewards for your business; stronger customer relationships and repeat business, increased brand equity, better word of mouth, and so much more. But it’s no small undertaking. It needs to be implemented well if it’s going to pay off, and you need a partner with deep experience of helping global brands achieve these objectives.

Meltwater’s suite of solutions provides the perfect platform for your social media customer service strategy. Seamless integration with Salesforce makes it easy for your customer service teams and social media staff to work together to deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences. 

Our social media management solution, Engage,  is built for cross-team collaboration, with customizable workflows, role-based dashboards, and a unified inbox to make sure all customer engagements are identified and handled by a team member. 

For identifying brand mentions outside of your owned social media channels, our social listening solution, Explore, integrates seamlessly with Engage, monitoring a comprehensive range of social media channels. It offers automated reporting and alerts to warn you when your brand mentions suddenly spike so you can identify problems early and react quickly. 

If you need enterprise level insights into your customers based on how they discuss your brand and products in digital spaces, our consumer insights platform, Radarly can provide that.

Social Media Customer Service Best Practices

Salesforce has announced that it’s sunsetting Marketing Cloud Social Studio, the company’s social media management platform. What does this mean for current Social Studio customers, and what steps should they take before the product finally reaches its end of life? This blog covers everything you need to know. 

What Are the Key Features of the Salesforce Social Studio?

How will the Salesforce Social Studio Sunset Work?

How To Prepare for the Salesforce Social Studio End-of-Life

What Is a Salesforce Social Studio Replacement/Alternative?

Salesforce Social Studio is a social media management and marketing platform developed by Salesforce, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software company. Social Studio is designed to help businesses and organizations manage their social media presence, engage with their audience, and analyze social media data to make informed decisions.

In the early days of social media, when businesses were just waking up to this revolutionary new channel, a SaaS platform called Radian6 was one of the best-known tools for monitoring your brand mentions on social. 

In 2011 Radian6 was acquired by the CRM company, Salesforce, which proceeded to integrate the platform into its own, eventually rebranding it as Salesforce Social Studio, and adding additional social media management features. 

Thirteen years later, it appears we’ve now reached the Salesforce Social Studio end of life, as the company announced the product will be sunsetted in late 2024 and no new subscriptions to the platform will be sold.

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