Many consumers have turned to a newer form of customer support due to current social trends. Have a service complaint? Send a tweet. Need assistance with a new product? Facebook message the company or post on the brand’s page. Want to show the impact a certain company made? Instagram the event or scene. Everything is going social and now consumers are expecting companies to follow suit.

If you’re connected to any of the social networks you’ve seen it before. Aggravated consumers lashing out at companies over their delayed flights, broken products, or terrible service. While this may deter some companies from wanting to engage in customer service for fear of visible threats, it is vital to staying on good terms with your customers.

Try responding to all posts on your sites regardless of their content (unless it’s so slanderous in language your company policies forbid the content from being on the site, or it would extremely damage future visitors to the site). Visitors see that even though there is a bad post or problem you are quick to respond to the issue and passionate about rectifying the situation. Some more frequent visitors will notice if you remove your posts and lose their trust in your brand. They see you hiding the problems instead of fixing them. Do not leave negative posts unanswered either. This implies you do not care about your followers or want to dedicate time to issues faced by clients.

Nothing is better than getting some shout outs about how much someone loves your business or what a great experience they had with you. If someone doesn’t know about your company, but sees their friend raving about you, you bet they’re going to search your business. Increased recognition leads to more web traffic to your site.

Being able to be there to respond to random questions or comments is imperative to generating more hype about you! If someone compliments you, retweet, share, like, pin, etc. Respond to questions as quick as possible. The average social media user has come to expect a response within an hour or two to consider it good customer service. Can’t constantly check the sites? Put your notifications on for your different platforms so you will personally be emailed each time someone posts a comment, messages, or leaves a question. The quicker the response, the more they’ll feel they can trust and depend on you for their needs.

As of recent polls, more than 1/3 of consumers are heading to branded social pages on Facebook to ask questions regarding their products and services. On top of that, 64% of Americans stated that social media influenced their buying decisions. Don’t lose out on this opportunity! That is a large market to ignore. In fact, customers that are engaging on social media with companies spend approximately 20-40% more with those companies, so don’t disregard your social interactions. Looking for which platforms to begin with? Facebook, Yelp!, and Twitter are some of the most frequently used when it comes to consumer reviews and interactions.

The fact of the matter is this, it’s all about multi-tasking and time management. If a client can hop on Facebook (or Twitter or some other platform), ask a question, and not have to worry about waiting on hold to receive the answer, isn’t that a better solution? They can receive a response immediately or even an hour or two later, but in the mean time they can get their tasks done. They can dedicate more time to themselves or things important to them, and less on focusing on how to rectify a problem. Most of all, they can rely on you to get back to them in an appropriate time frame with the best response or solution to their message.