How To Reply To Social Media Comments?

Social Media Comments:- If you’re a Social Media Manager or running your Social Media page, or a digital marketer, one of the key aspects of your daily work is replying to your follower’s comments. This task is crucial in maintaining strong follower engagement levels and creating lasting relations via Social Media presence.

So, if you’re looking for the proper way to reply to your Social Media page followers, then you have come to the perfect place. We will discuss the reasons why replying to comments can be a game-changer for establishing your company’s/personal brand presence. In addition, we will also share with you our exclusive secrets on how to do it well. 

Finally, we will give you specific guidelines on replying to comments received on different Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Without any further ado, let’s get to the topics at hand.

Significance Of Replying To Social Media Comments

Being a pivotal element of your Social Media Strategy, replying to comments gives you an opportunity to connect with your target segment. You are indirectly providing invaluable customer service. This will not only cement the bond with existing customers, but it also acts as a welcome card for the prospective new ones.

Building A Rapport With Customers

While interacting with your customers, you are showcasing a touch of personalisation and approachability. Helping them by providing your expertise in your niche can portray a feeling of friendliness and trust in your personal or organisational brand. They will feel an instant connection to you and your products or services.

Addressing each customer with their name and providing precise answers to their questions can boost rapport. Always attempt to understand their pain points and customise your answers accordingly, rather than giving generic answers to all.

Pro Tip:

The addition of GIFs, emojis, hashtags can make your replies look more appealing and attention-grabbing.

Helps Give A Professional Outlook

Never compromise on being professional, even though Social Media can make any marketer deviate towards being too casual. Ensuring consistency of messages you want to convey across various Social Media platforms helps make things more straightforward for the audience/customer.

Devising a Social Media strategy for all employees in your digital marketing department is essential. Everyone on the team must be aware of the style and tone that is apt to respond to your existing and new clients. Drafting response templates for various conversational scenarios can help automate the process to a pretty good extent.

The primary caveat to keep in mind is to demonstrate a personal touch and common sense when handling interactions with customers who show interest in getting in touch with you.

Never make your audience feel ignored by failing to provide an apt response to the queries. The personalisation element takes care of avoiding the sense of being robotic in your replies.

Fast Responses Lead to Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

Providing quick responses to your customer’s problems and queries create an impression that you genuinely care for them. According to Social Media Research, around 42% of consumers expect a response within an hour. 

Giving a quick and effective response to customers facing some issues can make your brand more customer-centric and valuable. However, rashness is never recommended. Giving a fast response for the sake of giving it can be counter-productive.

In the case when you are unsure of a quick resolution to a customer problem, a smart step would be to inform them periodically that you are working on it and will get to them at the earliest. This measure will make them feel secure and help avoid customer grievance.

The primary focus is on keeping the customer informed and felt heard. 

Prevent Escalation of Negative Comments

No matter how big your brand is, negative reviews and comments are almost impossible to avoid. Having a proactive attitude to responding quickly to them can be an effective mechanism of damage control. 

Fast resolution to critical comments by showing empathy to your dissatisfied followers/customers can help stem the inflow of further negativity. Some of the rapid resolution techniques are providing a link/contact information of the customer care service. You can also try to contact them personally or help them out with a comprehensive response comment.

Treat Every Problem With Equal Dignity

If you think a customer comment/query is childish and irrelevant, you are ruining your firm’s/personal reputation. Customer frustration due to lack of a solution can ultimately destroy the business deal and loss in revenue and brand impression.

New customers thinking of buying your product/service will start taking a step back, repelled by your poor customer service. As per Twitter research, above 80% of the customers fail to recommend an enterprise to a friend if they did not receive a response to their comments on Social Media.

Irrespective of the gravity of the problem, treat your customers with utmost dignity. Ensure this by providing a reply to their comments. Whether your reply is brief or descriptive, that is secondary.

Word of mouth can be an accelerator for growth even on Social Media. A good review on resolving a seemingly minor issue can help scale rapid growth in followers and business. Ultimately, the impetus should be on providing value to the end customer through your replies. 

If you focus on solving your audience’s pain points and challenges, Social Media growth is bound to happen sooner than later. 

Create A Brand Differentiation

Consistent engagement with your followers on Social Media can be a stand out factor. Most brands often ignore that Social Media is a two-way street. It is not enough if you constantly populate the feeds of your followers. Invest time in listening to what troubles them and use it to your advantage.

How To Provide Proper Replies On Social Media Platforms

In this section, we will discuss the specifics on providing the apt replies when it comes to particular Social Media platforms.

Facebook

If you wish to reply to comments on your company’s Facebook page, you need to have the privilege of being an editor/administrator or moderator of the said page. Once you have been assigned this role, you have the option of responding to comments either publicly or as private/direct messages.

All you need to do is, click on reply under the comment posted on Facebook and convey your response. This action will showcase the comment to all following the page. 

In contrast, if you want to respond in private, Select the Message option below the comment. Then, type in your response and click on Send.

Instagram Ads

You can reply to comments that come up on the ads you put up on Instagram using the Facebook Ads manager. You need to select the Ad campaign you wish to manage and select the particular Ad whose comments you want to reply to.

You can then select the Instagram comments after selecting the Links drop-down menu. Adding a new comment is super easy. All you need to do is type your comment under the Add Comment section and hit Enter.

Additionally, you can also directly reply to people’s comments under your post. The user’s Instagram name is added to the comment by default while you reply.

Twitter

Twitter makes it simple as a button when it comes to replying to comments. Identify the Tweet you want to reply to. Then, click on the Reply icon underneath the Tweet. You may then type in the response and send the same.

The intended user will receive instant notifications regarding your reply. A point to remember is that this notification only applies when they follow your Twitter page.

Like in the case of Facebook, there is also the option of direct messaging. This can be applied by typing your private message by selecting the Message option under the Tweet. Direct Messaging is always the safer option while handling profoundly negative comments, and your firm’s reputation is at stake.

LinkedIn

Reply to comments on LinkedIn business pages again requires you to have Administrator privileges. Once that prerequisite is taken care of, replying is easy. 

Identify the comment to which you wish to reply and click on the Reply option. Type your response and send it.

There is an added feature that allows you to include photos in your replies. To enable the same, select the Photo icon in the Add Reply field and give your comment an appealing visual element instead of sticking to text message alone.

A Point To Note

A question may arise whether you need to reply to each comment that arises on your Social Media pages or not. The answer is, ‘It depends”. If your Social Media scale is low, i.e., you only have a few hundred or thousands of followers with a dozen comments to reply to, you can consider replying to all the comments.

On the other hand, if you manage pages with millions of followers, replying to every comment out there can be hugely tedious. Some comments are meant for intimidation and entertainment purposes only. We recommend you ignore those unless the reputation of your company is at stake.

All your followers are watching your comments. Never convey a message that will harm your brand’s public image. Not replying is better than a wrong reply. The last thing you or your firm wants is to start an online brawl that happens at the expense of your Social Media presence.

You can spoil years of effort to build your Social Media presence and expand brand reach with a few seconds of recklessness. To make things worse, wrongly worded replies that offend a community/person/institution can lead to legal issues. This scenario can end up in official orders to take down your Social Media pages. 

Concluding Remarks

Replying to comments that arise on Social Media platforms is indeed a process that must not be ignored while growing your business or brand online. This process becomes simple once you are familiar with the mechanism associated with each platform. 

Take control of your Social Media interactions using proactive replies.  Always remember that these platforms are a two-way street. Listening and responding can make a difference at times.

We hope this blog gave you some valuable insights on the significance and procedure to deliver personalised replies to comments on Social Media. Feel free to share your opinions and thoughts on this topic in the comments section below. We assure you that we would respond to them!