Perhaps the full title for this post should really be: “How to be on Social Media All the Time…or at least make people think that you are!”
Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter require you to appear “visible” practically all of the time, to be available to answer questions, respond to complaints and generally encourage new and existing customers to interact with you, not only as a brand, but on a personal level as well. People want to be able to trust you, but if you’re not around, they might come to the conclusion that you don’t care, and that you’re not really interested in what they want.
The problem with being permanently visible, is that in the world of business, it’s just not possible for someone to literally be visible all of the time.
You can’t exactly hire someone to spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week to stare obsessively at their computer screen, just waiting for someone to ask a question or enquire about something.
When a customer contacts you through your website’s contact form, the most common way of addressing the time it will take to respond, is by setting up an Auto-Reply to assure them that you will deal with their query as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, in the fast-paced environment of social media, auto-responses are considered slow, and most importantly cold, because the reason people use social media is to talk to a person, not to what they consider to be a machine.
So, how can you go about your every day business, whilst still appearing to be available all of the time?
The trick is to adjust the settings on all of your social media accounts so that every time someone writes on your Facebook Wall, leaves a comment on a status, tweets you on Twitter, or mentions you, you will receive a notification straight to your email informing you about it.
As a result, you can quickly respond appropriately.
How to adjust notification settings on Facebook:
- Open up your Facebook business page, and click the button that says “Update Page Info”
- Click the “Settings” tab at the top of the screen, scroll down until you reach “Notifications” and select to edit
- Here you can select to have notifications sent using Facebook, or to your email account.
How to adjust notification settings on Twitter:
- Sign into your Twitter business account, and click on the cog symbol next to the “Compose New Tweet” button
- From the drop down menu select “Settings” and click on “Email Notifications”
- From here you can select everything that you want to be notified about, including whenever you are mentioned, when your tweets are re-tweeted and even when someone joins in a conversation that you are a part of.
Setting up such notifications are ideal especially when you are not in your email account all the time, or when you are out-and-about, because the notifications can be set up as alerts directly to your smart phone.
