Chatbots, the intelligent robots, have emerged as the most trending technology in the last few years.
By 2022, chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion per year! No doubt, that’s a huge number.
And with growing expectations of the customers, tough competition and shrinking marketing budgets, companies could use some real help.
Chatbots, the machine learning powered self-learning robots, rely on data analysis to solve tons of different marketing problems.
In our last post on chatbots for marketing, we discussed how you can use these for driving sales, offering customer service, research and managing your marketing team.
Also Read: Top 5 Types of Chatbots For Solving Business Problems
In 2018, 25% of total online marketing budget of the brands is expected to go to social media. This means you can no longer ignore social media in your digital marketing strategy.
However, it’s a big task to manage a huge following on social media channels.
Tasked with regular updates, customer queries & concerns, your team would be drowned with notifications.
Solution?
Chatbots in Social Media Marketing
In 2017, over 100,000 chatbots were active solely on Facebook.
While several call the technology over-hyped, there are brands who are silently using the bots. The bots are handling customer service and even, online sales for the brands.
That’s the reality.
So, how can you use chatbots in your social media marketing strategy? Here are some ways I can suggest. But first, let’s just explore the possibilities with the most obvious one - chatbots for customer service.
1. Chatbots on Social Media For Customer Service
Nobody wants to send an email and wait for a response for 2 working days. Customers, addicted to instant gratification, expect a response in 30 minutes, if not less.
It’s highly likely that your customer is going to complain about his problems on Twitter instead of sending you an email. Your team needs to be there to address the concerns, before it blows up and turns into a PR disaster.
Deploying a chatbot for customer service on Twitter, Facebook, or Facebook messenger can help you offer 24/7 customer service and reduce the staffing cost.
One biggest advantage that businesses often don’t foresee is data collection.
Also Read: 9 Best Uses Of Chatbots For Restaurants
With every conversation, the machine learning powered bot will learn about your customers, record the data, organize it into customer personas and help you create more targeted advertisement plans.
With that being said, don’t be that airlines brand which accepts the thanks of a disgruntled customer because they lost his luggage when he replied with a “Thank you” in the Tweet.
Yes, your bot needs to learn sarcasm too.
This is why the regular bots that offer answers on the basis of pre-fed FAQs won’t work. You need a self-learning bot.
We, at Hurekatek, have helped several customers with such intelligent chatbots solutions.
2. Shopping on Social Media
An average internet user spends 50% of 5 hours a day of online surfing on social media. And they don’t want to leave this social media cocoon.
So how do you fight this natural consumer behavior and sell your products & services to them?
Simple, sell on social media itself!
It’s the easiest option for e-commerce brands with Facebook shop allowing a person to shop and pay on the social media website.
You can also show your entire catalog in a Messenger conversation.
There are thousands of active chatbots on Facebook messenger, searching and suggesting products to customers already.
Don’t miss out on this.
3. Handling Your Social Media Accounts
Dealing with a few thousand followers on Twitter is a breeze.
But when your followers grow beyond that, your humans are set to fail.
It’s simply impossible to deal with thousands of notifications, queries, DMs and Tweets with 100% accuracy.
But chatbots can do it.
They can help you interact with each of your followers (potential customers), making them feel that you care for them, so much so that you give each of them personal attention.
The kind of customer relationships and brand authority you will create for yourself in just a few years would be unbeatable.
Also Read: 5 Reasons Why Using Chatbots in Retail Is A Must
Another possible use of chatbots in account handling could be for sending important alerts.
With more and more people using Adblockers, even Google Chrome is coming up with its own adblocker extension, nobody wants those push notifications you send to people on their browsers.
However, a notification by a ‘friend’ on social media is still welcome.
A bot can send specific alerts - imagine new company policies, new sales or new products, and keep your customers informed about the latest happenings in your company.
4. Social Media Research
While we have tools like Google analytics and Search Console to analyze the visitor behavior on websites, we are often blindsided on social media.
We don’t get to know much about our followers, their preferences and behavior except for the limited analytics offered by the social media channels.
Doing competition research on social media is a nightmare. Even if just a few people are talking about your niche, the amount of data to analyze is ginormous.
It’s too much to be processed by a human. You need a machine with human intelligence.
You’re already reading about them. So you just need to take action.
5. Improve Productivity of Your Employees
An average small business has 2-3 people working on social media. All of these are overloaded with work, stressed and are not able to deliver their full potential.
With chatbots, you can significantly reduce their time spent on redundant tasks and increase their output.
Checking emails, planning appointments, keeping track of calendar and scheduling, conversations with other team members - all of this can be handled by a chatbot which would work as a personal virtual assistant for each of the employees.
Imagine, doubling your workforce without increasing your expenses. With a one-time investment, your new workforce would be ready.
Those are some of the most powerful ways to use chatbots in social media marketing.
Many brands are already using it and improving customer experience, sales through social media and reducing the workload of their employees. Are you using them?
Get in touch with us if you’re ready to take the plunge and need machine learning consultation.
