Who Social Cares on Social Media?

Scott: Hello, and welcome to the show today. You will hear the advice of Brooke B. Sellas. Founder and chief executive officer at B Squared Media and author of the book, Conversations That Connect. Today, she'll help us understand how to provide social care in social media through listening, responding, and conversing with others.

My name is Scott Murray, and this is the content brief where I bring you the key points and takeaways from conversations. With today's experts and humanized and innovative content. Every time you hear this sound, that's a key takeaway from today's episode. Let's get started.

Thanks for joining me today. Brooke B. Sellas is the founder and chief executive officer of B squared media, a boutique digital marketing agency, specializing in social care, AKA social media, customer support, and social media marketing. And by the way, their marketing mantra is. Think conversation, not campaign.

She is also the author of Conversations That Connect, How to Connect, Converse, and Convert Through Social Media Listening and Social Led Customer Care. And here's what she means by social led customer care, or today, she calls it social care.

Brooke: It's really just the act of listening for and responding to your customers or would be customers.

Questions, complaints, compliments, grievances on social media. And what we found over doing this service for eight years for our clients is that inquiries that come to, uh, social pages on their social media channels or brands on our social media channels typically fall into two categories. Acquisition or retention, or you could also call it gain and retain.

So really we're looking at the entire digital customer journey, um, from awareness all the way through loyalty, advocacy, um, engagement. And looking at conversations throughout that digital life cycle to help gain new clients and retain current clients. Sprout Social, which is a wonderful social media tool.

We actually use Sprout, so shout out Sprout. They started talking about how their platform meets social care where it And there are other tools that do the same thing, like Sprinklr. Now they have case management, where you're literally doing case management and customer service or support through your social media tool.

Because if you think about it, fewer and fewer people are actually going to physical stores to shop, right? It's all now digital research, digital shopping, digital orders. Um, shopping online is not going away. It's here to stay. And we are seeing brick and mortar businesses kind of slowly fade away.

Commercial real estate is really hurting right now. Malls are hurting right now. So it's more imperative for those stores, but all brands now more than ever, To think about customer experiences online, right? So through your website, through email, and then obviously social media, because. If you want to continue to appeal to people with your products and services, they will prefer to do that, uh, online versus in store.

There's been a fundamental shift in the way we, we shop. Um, but the other thing is that if you look at the research that keeps coming out with these, um, younger audiences, as they're now looking at brand conversations on social, so this is where the brand engages in conversation A person on social media, they're now waiting those conversations just as high.

It's not higher than online reviews. So that's a serious stat to think about, right? We used to think online reviews, we're going to get us the deal or not get us the deal. And now it's really more of those brands conversations that you are or are not having are going to help you get that deal or not get that deal.

Scott: For some time, one of the most talked about topics. Regarding social media and brands is how to respond to negative comments. Some may not even be listening. So comments just sit and fester on social media. Other times, brands may just try to move that conversation off social and maybe into a private chat.

Brooke says that might not be the best thing to do.

Brooke: It doesn't always work, especially when we're talking about those angry conversations or when somebody wants to go and air their grievances about a product or a service or a brand. So, what's really important is understanding that wherever the customer is, they are on their channel of choice.

Wherever they decided to reach out to you, whether it be Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter, which is now X, That is their channel of choice. That is where they chose to reach out to you. And if you want to create a better customer experience, we know that customer experience is making that journey easier, not harder.

So we don't want to move them off of that channel unless it's absolutely necessary or critical. And unfortunately, like I'm saying, in those angry situations, they want everybody to be a spectator on what's going on, right? So how you respond, how quickly you respond, how quickly you're able to get a resolution for that person becomes really important because everybody's watching.

Scott: And by the way, don't just wait for negative comments or situations to provide a response. Because if you never respond to positive comments, that's not a good look either.

Brooke: So many employees, when you think about it, they work Monday through Friday, nine to five. That's typically how most organizations are set up.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. However, we also know that social is a 24 seven gig. And so what happens a lot of times, and especially when we first start working with clients, they'll come to us and they'll say, you know, we work Monday through Friday, but by the time our team leaves on, you know, Friday evening and they come back on Monday morning, there's a ton of conversation we have to get to.

And so we can't even filter through all of it until the middle of the week, the following week. And a lot of times what we hear is they're only addressing the negative comment, which makes a lot of sense, right? You want to help mitigate any crises that could pop up or take care of any that have popped up.

But at the same time, you're leaving out all of that positive conversation that's happening. That also isn't a good look. You want to respond to everything and everyone to show that you actually care about your customers. So, you know, whether it's a crisis or whether it's just somebody saying like, Hey, I just bought your coffee for the first time and I found it to be incredibly Um, good and smooth and didn't give me the jitters or whatever.

That's important content too. That's an important conversation. It's user generated content. It's a peer to peer testimonial, right? So all of those things are important as well. So, you know, we like to say that yes, the negative is really important and that's where you always want to start. Start, but ultimately the goal is getting our hands around all of the conversations that are happening about a brand, whether they're directly mentioned or indirectly mentioned and joining in those conversations, collecting the voice of customer data, and then, you know, action, some sort of action with it.

What can we do with this good thing? What do we do about this bad thing? You might've heard Andy

Scott: Crestodino on the show recently. We talked about that line between AI content and people content. And how there are just some things that should be always written by people. Well, don't let AI, automation, or cut and paste represent how you respond to people on social.

You've seen this sort of thing in other places. Maybe when you're scrolling through, let's say, some Reviews for a restaurant or hotel or other establishment. And you see those negative and positive comments and reviews. And then the business responds with the same comment for like everything. So like. On the negative side, it may say something like, We're sorry to hear your experience was less than ideal.

Please contact us. And then you see that response for everyone. It doesn't address anyone by name, or maybe it does, but then it says the same comment over and over again. It just doesn't respond to the specific situation. And it definitely lacks empathy using AI to talk with people or respond to people can give the impression that you don't really well care and we're talking about social care.

Brooke: We actually had another client using a tool, um, to do that for the reviews and they started to receive backlash. People started to say, like, it's look, look at the last seven answers. It's obvious that this is, you know, a bot. Just posting this over and over again. You don't actually care about us. And so it's so interesting right now because we're at this whole intersection of, you know, customer experience or CX and A.

I. And I think, you know, I am a huge proponent of A. I. We use A. I. For a lot of the things that we do with customer care. One of the things I would never put my weight behind is using a bot like that to just give out those generic answers because one of the things I think I see coming out of a big trend with social media, especially as it comes to gaining those, those new customers.

People are looking for what we call hyper personalization. They don't want to be treated as, you know, your customer or even a segment of your customers. They want you to see them as Brooke. And how can you give me Brooke? What I am asking for, not your policy, not the current sale. What can you do for me as an individual?

It was, um, it was Gartner and they just released a study and I don't want to get the numbers wrong. Um, But it was something like, um, the retailers who had put AI to use, um, for, you know, customer service or, or customer experience through social media and the web. Only a certain amount of the customers actually used it, you know, chose to use it over talking to a human.

I want to say it was like 39 percent low, right? And of the people who use it, which I know for a fact it was way less than 50, but I can't think of the exact number, only 8%, only 8 percent of the low number of people who hadn't even tried it were willing to do it again. So while these brands and these organizations are in a hurry to implement AI, their customers are nowhere near ready.

And so I think that's something they really need to think about. You know, I think a lot of. Companies are just launching into, look, we've got AI, you know, instead of thinking about like, does my customer want this and is my customer going to use this and is it actually going to make the customer experience better for my customer?

Scott: Another common question that is going to come up in a lot of organizations when it comes to social media is. Where's the ROI or how do we track success on social media, social care, and the focus on using social media as a social platform enables you to answer some of those ROI questions. In fact, Brooke says she's already written about 10, 000 words towards a new book.

That will go into detail on topics just like that.

Brooke: So, my whole second book is all about this. The first book was, uh, Conversations That Connect. And the second book is Return on Conversation. And literally what I'm doing is I'm going through the past two years since the book came out, the first book came out.

We've been testing these intent based social selling programs. Because essentially I wanted to prove that yes, You can actually get a return on investment through AI, right? You can get a revenue return on an investment. But what I found was it happened in the conversation. And through this intent based selling program that we've been, um, testing with a few of our clients, we sound one book.

Number one, I talked about, Hey, as we're having all these conversations online, what we're realizing is that a lot of these conversations are gain based or acquisition based, right? People are asking research questions as they're doing their research on social media. They're asking questions of the brand, right?

So when we were able to, to identify those and tag those and label those and say, wow, here's all this acquisition conversation happening. The example I give in the book is I have a tech brand that had four product lines out of 12 that every single month saw acquisition conversation, 60 percent or higher.

Meaning for that month, all of the conversation around that product on social channels was about gain or acquisition, right? So then now what Booktube is going to explain is how do we. Join in those conversations, knowing that there's an interest, but not intent, right? Because interest doesn't equal intent.

And how do we look for some of those intense signals or triggers to then try to social sell someone? And again, we want to keep them on their trail of choice. So if Scott comes to a Brooks shoe brand and he's like, Hey, do you have this shoe in green? And I can come back and say, yes, Scott, we do. Are you interested?

Or what are you thinking? What do you like about green? It's green. Your favorite color is my favorite color too. Whatever that conversation looks like. If you go from interest to intent, yes, green is my favorite color and I have to have these shoes. Then I'm able to say something like, Oh my gosh, green's my favorite color too.

And if you use the promo 1 when you buy the shoes, we'll give you free shipping.

Scott: 1 2 3 4 5. Yes.

Brooke: That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. So when Scott goes and buys the shoes online, right? He's making it very easy for that, that customer experience to happen from consideration to buying the product.

And he uses that code, that revenue gets attributed to the social care team, which is ultimately attributed to social media, which now starts to make those stakeholders sit up and pay attention and understand, A, that social is valuable and that you can get to a return on investment with social through conversation and B, it makes them want to invest more.

Into social and the social selling programs or what we call return on conversation, because this is the first and only time in many of these clients cases where they can directly attribute revenue to social media, because, you know, here's what most marketers concentrate on. They think return on conversation or ROC stands for return on content.

I can't tell you how many marketers I've seen say like engagement's not that big of a deal. It's the biggest deal. It should be the strategy because how many of you listening right now have put out tons of amazing content that's even selling stuff, sales, you know, trying to get to a return and nothing happens.

That's why it's not return on content. It's return on conversation because conversations where ROI happens, conversations where community happens. If you're trying to build a community. Conversations where resolution to crises happen. I mean, really the conversations are or should be at the center of your flywheel when it comes to social media growth.

Scott: So if this all makes sense, you might be asking, why don't we see more brands take a conversational approach to social media content? Well, I would say it's most likely one of two reasons. Number one. It's easier to approach it as a promotional tool, even if there's little to no engagement. Number two, they don't know how to generate conversations on social.

And maybe it's because all they've done is just post and promote, and if that hasn't gotten any engagement, it might be hard for them to visualize how suddenly they're going to create things that are going to create conversation. They may just simply say, well, we don't get engagement. How are we going to get conversations taking place here?

But the point is If your content isn't generating much engagement or conversation, then it's the wrong type of content.

Brooke: Yeah. Your content needs to be more conversational, period. Like that should be the goal of content. It is the vehicle. Content is the vehicle that gets you to engagement. Engagement gets you to conversations.

Conversations gets you to all those wonderful things I just talked about. So I have a free course on creating conversational content that anybody can go and take. Let's say you're just starting out or maybe you have a ton of followers. You're already established, but you've only been sharing, you know, regular content on social.

Think about how you can start to get your audience to engage with you. So the layup way is polls, right? Almost every social media platform has a poll feature. Now, even LinkedIn has this, which is now my platform of choice, but start to pull your audiences, right? That's a one click. We're thinking about customer experience.

The less clicks. The more seamless the experience is, that's a one click answer, right? So a lot of times I'll see polls, especially on LinkedIn, where hundreds of people have voted but maybe two people liked that post or whatever. So you're giving people the opportunity to weigh in but not really show themselves, right?

Because we still have lurkers as one of our biggest audiences on social. So let the lurkers lurk, but give them a way to give you a voice of customer data, right? Then once you have a lot of people talking on your poll, you can start to do one word answers where they might have to show up, but you'll see these as like, put in a heart emoji for, you know, True or a thumbs down emoji for false or whatever.

So people are coming in, they're leaving that innocuous, you know, not that big of a deal answer slash emoji, but they are showing up, right? And then you leave them into like a blank or an Olympic sport. I would win a gold medal in and then I would say something like, And mine would be overthinking, you know, and then people like laugh and they come in and they leave their comment.

We also like to, uh, have seen brands do what we call the non controversy controversy, which is like, um, beauty brands do this a lot. They're like, okay, the right way to get ready is wash your face. wash your hair, do your makeup, then do your hair. And then they're like, no notes, whatever. Right. And then other people are like, um, no, I do this and this, and then I do this.

Right. So it's like, it's a non controversy controversy, but we've seen a lot of brands start doing this. I'll be talking about it a lot in the new book, but it's really smart. Because it's not really a controversy. We're not getting into those heavy subjects or getting ourselves in trouble, but we're getting people to be like, you're wrong.

This is how you get ready. I am right. Almost every brand can come up with some sort of non controversy controversy. Social media should be the playground, right? That should be the place where you tap ideas and creatives and fun conversations or non controversial controversial things. Because. You're getting people to weigh in, and they may not be a customer, they may be a customer, they could be a would be customer, they could just be somebody who is engaging but will never buy from you.

But the point is, the, the voice of customer data that you are able to collect by having these conversations.

Scott: You know, this has me thinking about the conversation with Andy Crestedina again, because Brooke talking about the non controversy controversy thing reminds me of how Andy was saying the same thing when it came to high engagement content, and sometimes that content has some of the most mundane topics that just really get people talking.

Like the Oxford comma whether to use it or not or when he was on this show He said that once you put sugar creamer and other stuff in coffee. Well, it's no longer coffee. It's a candy bar It's not hard to imagine people arguing about that But you might be saying if we use that example, how can my business talk about that?

And not be in the coffee business. I mean, that is so far removed from what we do. How would we even do something like that? Well, as Brooke said, be creative. Let me give you this example. This is kind of a way that someone found a way to talk about. A current event at the time and use their industry and their company service to talk about it.

It was already a hot topic because the topic was the pandemic and this was an event planning company and they shared a post about how event planners would address the pandemic and solve it. And it was kind of a fun way to put a spin on some of the. Common and maybe stereotypical behaviors, mindsets, and habits of event planners.

And the engagement exploded. I mean, and it, it's not surprising. It was very clever. So there were all kinds of comments and conversations. And I believe LinkedIn even recognized that company as one of the best company pages on their site that year. And that whole write a sentence and let people fill in the last word that Brooke was talking about, you know, like, if I won a gold medal, it would be in blank.

Yeah, that's proven to work, too.

Brooke: Tweety Bird taught Heta a what?

Scott: Romulan. When I went to Social Media Marketing World a couple years ago, Michael Stelzner said Social Media Examiner had tried that on platforms like Facebook, and responses exploded. And what's funny, when everybody got together for, you know, a big session, might have been a keynote or something, Someone stood up and said, after hearing that at the convention, they tried it out literally that weekend and experienced a very similar result.

She was like, blown away by it. There is some sort of psychology there. People enjoy sharing something about themselves, and they can do it in one word. In this case, there's just some sort of gratification in that. So, use it. Be creative. Maybe you find a way to get your audience to share a pain point or a need they have in order to make their lives easier.

But, let's take a look at some of the more serious or maybe more business focused or deeper sides of the conversation and the importance of Um, emotional intelligence, empathy, listening, and response. You can't simply wait for conversations to happen on your posts, on your content feed. They could be taking place online and you have to know how to listen for them.

And then respond to them. This means whoever is involved in your social media marketing, they have to know more than just how to use social media.

Brooke: When we're hiring community managers who essentially work for our brands, right? We have shifts. So you go on shifts, you work for a certain brand for a certain number of hours. And all you're doing is responding to comments that come in. Social care has to be proactive. Otherwise, all we're doing is social media moderation.

Right? We're waiting for stuff to come to us. That's social 101. It's moderation. Hopefully, you're doing that. If you aren't, you gotta do the 101 before you can get to the 201, which is social care. We also have to be proactive. So we're also using, uh, social listening for looking at keywords, like the brand's name, the stakeholders, the product names, right?

Cause think about it. If I talk about a product online, maybe it's the name of a lipstick. I'm not necessarily tagging the brand, but I am talking about the brands and one of their products. So we use social listening to help find those conversations. And we're essentially either. Recording voice of, uh, customer data from that conversation.

So passively looking at it or actively doing in that conversation and thing. We're so glad you love that color. Did you know we're running a deal right now? Let's buy one, get one, et cetera, whatever. So I think when we're hiring people who are going to do something like that, we usually look at their, uh, customer experience background.

So it doesn't matter if they've done social, believe it or not. We look at customer experience. We'll look at hospitality. We look at somebody who has a large, uh, volunteer history because these are the people who want to get it right. They want to go the extra step and the extra mile to take care of that person, whether they're asking a sales question and it's a pleasant conversation or they're making a complaint, and it's not a pleasant conversation.

We want. The, the community managers to feel, um, they have to have empathy, right? They have to want to help that person succeed. So that's what we look at, you know, social media can be taught how to use sprout social can be taught how to answer conversations in a way that shows empathy can also be taught.

I think what can't be taught and what has to be inherently there in the person is that willingness to go the extra mile. We can't hire box checkers. To do this kind of job. One of our longest term team members, Chrissy, shout out to you, just celebrated her seventh anniversary with us. She was with us for seven years and she's been a community manager that whole time.

And she actually is a business owner on the side. They own a computer, like a doctor company, like, like they fix computers and whatnot. I will tell you, she. Was always just so curious and wanting to learn more. So I think also, you know, having that, that person who's curious and wanting to go, huh, well, why, why do we have to follow this policy?

Why can't we give them a refund if X happens? You know, That person is, who has that curiosity, innate curiosity, is also going to kind of dig in and go further.

Scott: All right. Well, if you've decided you'd like to get Brooke's first book, Conversations That Connect, and then anticipate what's coming in her next book next year.

Here's what you can expect.

Brooke: The first book kind of set you up for what social care is. And literally part one was like the psychology behind why it worked. Um, so it kind of gave the blueprint for you implementing a social care program. Book two does continue on. It's a continuation of that. It goes a little bit deeper into it's, you know, less about the psychology and very tactical, and it's setting you up to have these conversations that lead to a return on investment.

So the whole book is basically in a word, I guess, how to get to ROI through ROC or through the conversations that you're having. Like, here's literally how we do it. There's no gatekeeping. There are no secrets. Though the wizard is not behind the curtain, you know, I'm telling you step by step. And then it's going to go into, which is really interesting AI and how we're using AI, which is a great way to use AI, not to answer everything the same, but to help you with predictive analytics.

So part of what we're looking at right now is, you know, imagine that story where Scott bought those green pair of shoes using that promo code. And then I have all these Scots who've used that promo code. I'm now able to run that data through AI and say, Hey, look at my brand. Look at all the product lines that we have.

Look at all these conversations that we had that closed, right? They turned into revenue. Look at all these conversations that happened and didn't turn into revenue. And tell me what you see, what conversations, what words, what promos work best with what product, right? So ultimately what the AI is doing is it's saying when you are selling green shoes and instead of free shipping, you offer a free second pair of laces.

You have a 10 X chance of closing that deal or having that person use the code and buy the shoes right there. That is the power of AI. And that's just taking these steps. It's human run intent based social selling programs and powering them. It's like the magic mushroom in Super Mario Brothers, like you get that mushroom or that star and all of a sudden you're like, you're like glowing and going 10 times faster, right?

It's just helping humans be more efficient at selling. At proving a return on investment on ROI so that the stakeholders are now like, Oh, here, take all of our money. Keep doing what you're doing because now we have all this money coming in.

Scott: Okay. Let's revisit some of the key takeaways from this episode. Remember that social media inquiries typically fall into two categories, acquisition, or gaining new customers, and retention, keeping existing ones. Tailor your responses and strategies based on whether you're looking to acquire or retain customers.

You should proactively address both direct mentions and indirect conversations about your brand. Stay ahead of potential issues by monitoring and engaging with your audience regularly. You can implement social listening tools to monitor keywords related to your brand, products, and stakeholders. That way you can join relevant conversations, even if your brand isn't directly mentioned, and then use the gathered data to inform your strategies and engagement.

It's important to respond quickly to customers on their chosen social media platform and not try to move the conversation off that platform. You need to reply to feedback and show that you value their time and their concerns. You can create engaging content like polls and non controversial controversies to encourage interaction.

For example, you can use social media polls to ask simple questions. One click questions that gather valuable customer opinions and insights. Focus on hyper personalization in your responses. For example, you can address customers by their names and tailor your interactions to their specific needs and preferences.

Avoid using generic responses, especially when dealing with grievances or complex inquiries. And finally, prioritize meaningful conversations over just pushing content. Use ROI by addressing customer needs directly. Providing tailored solutions and building a loyal community. I will have links to Brooke Sellas on the show notes for this episode.

Those links will include a link to her book, her page on LinkedIn, and her website, bsquared. media. If I can help you improve your content to better stand out or communicate with others, you can email me at scott at scottmurrayonline. com or reach out to me on my website, which of course is scottmurrayonline.com. I'd like to thank Brooke B Sellas for being a guest on today's show and thank you for joining us on The Content Brief.