5 Most Important Roadblocks for Real-Time Social Media Engagement

Social media is about being able to engage with your audience, and replying in real-time to your customers’ issues and complaints.

For quite a number of brands, bringing this about is still a mystery. What is holding brands back? Which roadblocks prevent them from living up to their customers’ expectations?

Take a look at our most important roadblocks for real-time social media engagement:

1. Not Making Sense of Social Media Data

Who is talking about my brand? Do I really know my customer?

Brands often use social media simply to broadcast marketing messages, and therefore, leave crucial customer concerns unattended. However, social media is an important sounding board for valuable customer feedback. Although brands have access to that pool of information about their customers, they fail to make sense of the data.

2. Handling Large Volumes of Incoming Social Media Messages

Brands often fail to take the right actions due to the large volume of incoming social media mentions. Unfortunately, they aren’t pulling the right data and get distracted by the incoming ‘noise’. Moreover, it’s often the case of not passing on responsibilities to the right person, which leaves them with large quantities of unattended messages.

3. Fully Maximizing Social Media Impact

Brands are using multiple, basic tools at once which makes it quite difficult to maximize their impact on social media. The actual decision-making process of purchasing new software is often in the hands of top-level management who still need to be educated on the value of new, more expensive software. Important requirements for social media tools, like user-friendliness, are often neglected. However, brands should be able to set the right priorities when it comes to investing in these tools.

4. Involving the Entire Company

Interactions on social media are an important part of the customer journey. Social media agents should truly make an effort to provide consistency throughout this customer journey. For example, in-store touch points should not differ from conversations on social. In multiple cases, however, brands don’t have the right resources (team and skills) in place to manage a global social media presence and deliver consistency.

Social media isn’t simply the responsibility of a single social media team: customer support teams and social media teams should work closely together. Moreover, PR, Security (in case of hacking), etc. are commonly ignored departments. As a result, departments are working in silos.

5. Creating an Online Support Center

Brand's online support centers lack the right information or aren’t regularly updated in order to seamlessly hand over the right information to their customers. They are often clueless when it comes to the different types of customer questions they receive through social media.

Want to learn how to actually master real-time social media engagement? Take a look a these solutions to overcome the roadblocks.

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