Of the ~8 billion people on earth, 5.17 billion1 are registered social media users. That's ~64% of the global population. To cater to this majority, businesses have turned to automated programs in order to engage with users conversationally, like an assistant at a physical store would guide them. These are social media chatbots.
Table of contents
- Need for social media chatbots
- How to use chatbots for social media
- Types of social media chatbots and how they work
- Benefits of social media chatbots
- The best AI social media chatbot platform for your business
- How to build a social media chatbot using SalesIQ
- Social media chatbots: Best practices
Need for social media chatbots
One key principle in running a business, especially in this crowded, competitive market, is to meet customers where they are and make it easy for them to connect with us.
Over the years, brick-and-mortar stores where customers meet businesses have evolved into websites and social pages where businesses compete to gain customers' attention. Communication, too, has grown from physical mail and emails to instant social messaging.
As we can see, the scope of social media has been dominant, and it has become mandatory for businesses to have a social media presence. While small businesses can handle customer communication manually, as the company scales, social media chatbots become necessary to provide a better and uniform engagement experience.
How to use chatbots for social media
Equipped with conversational capability, these chatbots can be updated with knowledge resources about the business's offerings, synced with frequently asked questions to troubleshoot issues, and perform the functions of a marketer, sales executive, and support expert.
These abilities help customer service teams use social media chatbots as the first line of visitor communication. They answer and resolve basic queries, so visitors are routed to available agents only if they need additional help.
Chatbots also help the sales team as they can explain to prospects how the product/service can help them, share relevant collateral for deeper understanding, and clarify any queries prospects have about pricing, features, and more.
Marketers use social media chatbots to collect leads, qualify and categorize them based on conversational quality, and push them to the sales team for conversion.
Types of social media chatbots and how they work
There are three types of chatbots for social media:
Rule-based chatbots
The traditional rule-based chatbots are pre-defined flows used mainly by businesses to capture information. Communication between the chatbot and visitors would be one-way, as they can't converse.
If your business only needs to capture information, rule-based traditional social media chatbots suit you.
FAQ chatbots
FAQ chatbots are the advanced version of rule-based chatbots. With them, you can sync your knowledge base, resources, and other information about your business with the chatbot. Two-way communication is possible, as the chatbot can address and answer visitor queries and share the relevant collaterals.
Though communication can be two-way with FAQ chatbots for social media, it'll be rigid and not conversational. If your business only needs to relay some information, FAQ chatbots would be the ideal option.
Conversational AI chatbots
Adding AI to the mix breaks the limitations of the two earlier-generation chatbots and opens up many opportunities for businesses to explore and implement. It also empowers social media chatbots to have a human-like conversation with all visitors at a low operating cost. AI can also help nudge visitors to make a purchase call, answer their queries, navigate them to explore, and more.
Conversational AI chatbots are the way to go, especially for social media, where people expect personalized conversation. They'll help businesses provide a great experience.
Benefits of social media chatbots
As businesses grow, scaling their marketing, sales, and customer support teams incurs a massive operational cost. When they don't scale, it reflects in the poor engagement experience visitors and customers have to go through.
Social media chatbots can come to the business's rescue as they offer a plethora of benefits, such as:
Available 24/7
One of the non-negotiable expectations customers have from businesses is that they are available whenever needed. As everyone has started catering to global markets, restrictions based on business hours are hampering growth and causing opportunities to be lost.
With social media chatbots, people can reach out to businesses around the clock to prospect their offerings or get support from the team. The always online chatbots will collect information about interested prospects and share it with the marketing team. They'll explain the use cases and share relevant collaterals to nudge prospects further down the sales funnel. For existing users, they'll help troubleshoot issues if they're facing any and share relevant help guides so users can resolve the issues themselves.
By being available 24/7, social media chatbots ensure that visiting prospects and customers are always addressed and at least get some help instead of being left alone.
Instant response and improved efficiency
Because social media chatbots are available 24/7, users get instant responses, which lead to a minimal drop in visitors' conversations and increase the overall engagement rate of the businesses.
Availability and the ability to provide answers for all three aspects—marketing, sales, and customer support—also increase operational efficiency, as first-time visitors get all the essential information, prospects get in-depth information, and existing users get their issues resolved.
Scalability
Unlike physical agents who can attend to only one person (if it's an in-person conversation) or a few people (if it's a chat-based conversation), social media chatbots can attend to every one of your visitors simultaneously as they can be scaled across departments and organizations.
Saving operating cost
Though available 24/7, social media chatbots help businesses save operating costs. It's cheaper to scale chatbots than to have human agents. Also, because they can attend to all your conversations simultaneously, they help improve business efficiency.
Data insights
The chatbots will also give businesses consolidated insights on how they interact with the visitors, the commonly asked questions, first-response time, resolution rate, and more. With these insights, businesses can look into where they're lacking (lagging) and refine the aspects to fine-tune their engagement strategy.
To sum it up, social media chatbots, in general, help businesses engage better with their visitors and customers alike, leading to better engagement experiences that result in more leads, happy customers, and increased revenue.
Zoho SalesIQ, the best AI social media chatbot platform for your business
If you already use a chatbot solution or want to get one for your business, we recommend Zoho SalesIQ, the best AI social media chatbot platform.
Unlike other solutions available on the market, SalesIQ provides a powerful zero-code platform to build highly customizable, feature-rich chatbots for social media.
Features:
- It supports integration with all the major social media platforms worldwide: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Line, and WeChat.
- With Zobot, SalesIQ's zero-code bot builder, you can drag and drop blocks to build customized bots. These help your marketing teams showcase their offerings and generate leads, sales teams answer questions and nudge prospects, and support teams resolve queries without assistance.
- Businesses can integrate their knowledge base with the social media chatbot, which will answer all queries by referencing the attached resources.
- Answer Bot, powered by Zia, Zoho's NLP, is SalesIQ's conversational AI that helps businesses converse with visitors and assists with their queries.
- SalesIQ's social media chatbots can speak your visitors' language as it supports 35+ languages.
- Businesses can integrate SalesIQ with their platform and move the generated leads for further follow-ups. SalesIQ now supports direct integration with Zoho CRM, Bigin by Zoho CRM, and Salesforce CRM. With Webhooks, you can integrate it with any CRM.
- When Answer Bot doesn't provide a satisfactory resolution, the chatbot can be configured to create a support ticket so that the customer service team can address the issues as soon as they're available. Zoho Desk and Zendesk direct integrations are available.
- If you want to make your chatbot versatile, integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT is also available. It'll open up the conversation beyond what you've added from your resources.
- Chatbots can share customized booking slots over conversations if your business requires scheduling. This can be achieved through the Zoho Bookings integration.
- Businesses can get chatbot reports personalized to their engagement with social media. It'll give them ample insights on what's working, what's not, and how to improve.
How to build a social media chatbot using SalesIQ
Note: After signing up, you must integrate your respective social media accounts where you want to deploy SalesIQ's chatbot. For detailed integration videos, check out SalesIQ's YouTube page.
Step 1:Sign up for SalesIQ and head to Settings from the headquarters page.
Step 2: Select Zobot from the Bot module and click Add. This will open the configuration settings, where you can name the bot and add a description.
Step 3: Scroll down the configuration page and select the channels to deploy the social media chatbot you're currently building. You can also choose the languages you want your bot to speak.
Step 4: After configuring the bot behavior, the bot builder page will open. By default, you'll have a Welcome card where you can customize your welcome message.
Step 5: From here onwards, you can build the bot however you want it to behave. Once you've done so, click Publish at the top-right corner.
Social media chatbots: Best practices
Now that you've created a chatbot for social media, here are some best practices you should follow to get the best out of them.
Inform visitors upfront if they're conversing with chatbots. It'll set the expectation right, and they'll ask the correct questions.
Create a flow that helps your visitors engage better and have meaningful conversations. Periodically, go back to the reports, analyze how the bot is performing, and fix where your visitors are dropping.
As hyper-personalization is the buzzword, program your social media chatbot to converse as personally as possible based on the user's past interaction, search history, interested inquiries, etc.
Inform the users if you'll be storing any data, and if yes, leave a link to your privacy and security practices.
Give users the option to connect with your human operators straightaway if the visitors feel the bot replies aren't relevant/satisfactory.
Reference:
- https://backlinko.com/social-media-users
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