Determine Legitimacy

Determining the legitimacy of the complaint being directed at you is important to proceeding in asituation involving an upset customer. With anonymous commenters, trolling and fake reviews becoming more and more prevalent online, you must use your best judgment to figure out whether the user in question has a genuine reason to complain or is simply trying to stir things up. Always be polite and patient, even if the user becomes rude: So long as you’re offering calm, reasoned responses to the complaints, onlookers and other customers will be able to see that you’re doing everything you can to alleviate the situation. If a particularly pointed complaint is directed to your business in a public forum (eg. your Facebook wall), it’s best to reach out to the user privately and give them the name of someone they can speak to directly: As personal as social media is, nothing beats one-on-one dialogue with a real person.

Respond Quickly

In a scenario where your business makes a mistake and the upset customer deserves some form of vindication or compensation, mediums like social media make it easy to respond to the wronged party swiftly. Letting a customer know that you’re conscious of your error and are working to fix it offers peace of mind, even in situations where you can’t right the situation immediately. If the dialogue happens to take place in a comments thread (eg. on a Facebook post or someone’s Twitter feed), other users witnessing the conversation can “Like” or “Favorite” your business’s individual responses to indicate that they agree with your approach, too.

Never Lose Your Cool

While this is a fundamental rule of customer service in general, it’s doubly important for online. Internet users love a good flame war, and if you ever respond to someone in an irate manner, you lose the advantage/responsibility of professionalism that comes with speaking under your business’s name. Whether you’re in the right or not, using condescending or inciteful language in any form is likely to make onlookers side with the person making the complaint, so it’s just not worth it.

Photo Credit: The Nunez’s Group (Flickr)

While some would tell you that mixing business with personal isn’t recommended, social management is a different beast: Since your SMM is hired to speak under your company’s voice, its important for him/her to understand exactly what your business is about from an ethos/pathos perspective. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask your liaison for a casual meeting over coffee, or to add him/her personally on Facebook for the sake of building a relationship. You’ll find that as you get to know the person better, he/she will begin to understand your business through your eyes and post things that are more likely to be in tune with your own corporate ethics and beliefs.

Send Collateral On A Regular Basis

Though a competent SMM can discover and post information about your business on their own, its very important that you regularly update them with the latest information about your company that they might not be privy to without having an inside track. If you have access to internal collateral (product lists, new promotions, competition statistics etc.) that hasn’t been made public yet, forward it to them on a consistent basis either via email or through a cloud sharing service such as Dropbox. Even if you’re not sure how the content should be scheduled, send it anyway: its an SMM’s job to disseminate information about your business and disperse it to the public in a way that will drive engagement. Your SMM is essentially your internet public relations coordinator, and should be treated as such.

Specify Your Advertising Budget

Since most social media platforms have paid advertising options, many agency-proposed management plans will include an allocated ad budget within your monthly rate. If your SMM doesn’t offer this convenience, however, its recommended that you decide on a maximum monthly ad budget beforehand and take it into consideration alongside the proposed management fee. Most social ads run on what’s known as a “maximum cost-per-click” basis, meaning that you’ll only pay if and when someone actually clicks through to your website or respective social environment. SMMs are experts and maximizing the strength and reach of your budget, even if its a modest one, so don’t be afraid to play with different amounts on a month-to-month basis to see what works and what doesn’t.