6 Best Practices For Responding To Customers On Twitter

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Many brands that have an active presence on Twitter, will use it to respond to customers from time to time, or on a daily basis. Twitter is a great place for this because of its immediacy, but it’s also a challenge for exactly the same reason.

Also Read: 5 Obstacles To Great Customer Service On Social Media

If you are going to use Twitter as a customer-service tool, you should be very confident using the platform itself, but you should also know a few tips that will help you shine – best practices that will make you a lot better at it.

1. External Links

Apparently, using an external link as a call-to-action will reduce engagement by 19%, so if you feel you have to use a link at least make sure it is positioned about 45% into your tweet, say after 40-60 characters in. Try to avoid a link in the first reply. If you can, use it later on in the conversation. Remember that the first reply should be about diagnosing the request better – Giving out a link straight away pretty much defeats this purpose.

2. Calls-to-action

Some words are better than others when using a call-to-action in your reply. For example, the word “Click” gets 29% more engagement than the word “Find”. It could be that the first gives the listener the impression that you are answering their request, whereas the later gives them the impression that they will have to find it themselves. This is my assessment at least.

When replying to a customer on Twitter, choose your call-to-action word carefully!

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3. #Hashtags

A hashtag will increase engagement around 15%, but you need to be careful in using one or many. Your hashtag should be short and concise, and should help categorise your Tweet. Twitter is the platform that started hashtags, but that doesn’t mean you should go overboard. If you want to find out more about hashtags, click here.

4. Emoticons

Emoticons, especially positive ones in your responses will increase engagement by up to 67% in many cases. Emoticons are one of the indications we have of someone’s mood, or tone of voice even. You should engage people with emotion – they will reward you for it as answers can come across as totally dry at times. Especially if they are on Twitter.

Use emoticons and hashtags in a response tweet to increase engagement significantly.

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5. Punctuation

You should be frugal with punctuation as “every character counts” on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use punctuation. It is a good way to give better meaning to your responses by structuring them better for people to understand emphasis or query. Nobody understands a long sentence if it’s not punctuated properly. Get good at it, because the presence of punctuation also increases engagement about 27%.

6. Personalised Responses

I think this it pretty self-explanatory that we try to be more personal in our responses. Using someone’s first name to respond to them increases engagement another 20%. Your response should be made within roughly 92 minutes of the original tweet. Many people would say it’s less than that, but I think an hour and a half is sufficient. Except of course if something is very urgent, in which case someone probably shouldn’t be contacting you on Twitter in the first place.

Using someone’s first name to respond to them on #Twitter increases engagement another 20%.

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