No “Best” Social Media Platform For Customer ServiceWith so many possible platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and dozens of others the challenge is to optimize your investment to provide the best possible service. But which one to use?
The first thing you need to know is that for most customer service contacts occurring on social media, almost all will involve moving customers off the platform, and into email, or telephone. It’s almost impossible to complete a customer service transaction on social media alone.
So Which Is Best? Twitter or Facebook
The two main contenders are Twitter and Facebook, based on the number of users, and where your customers may be “at”.
Neither is particularly suited to customer service, but Facebook allows longer messages while Twitter limits the lengths of exchanges.
Facebook has the advantage and disadvantage of allowing visible threads that are public, so keep in mind that if you serve customer publicly, others will be able to see the entire interactions later.
Twitter has a better sense of immediacy.
Facebook is more complex, from the standpoint of options. You can set up pages, or discussion groups or use a company home page, but that provides additional capabilities, but also requires more skill to use and maintain properly.
On balance, it’s probably a draw — that is, it doesn’t matter which one of these two that you choose.
Given that social media isn’t a very efficient way to converse with customers, you could still choose to forsake social media entirely, or set up a page on either or both platforms that “pushes” customer contacts to go to your website, and that it’s clear that customers need to phone, email or use the website for support and help.
