You have come up with the perfect post, the perfect caption, and have even cracked the “great timing code” – but still your comment box is all crickets.
Unlike everything else on social media – unfortunately, there’s no secret sauce or alternative to engage with your audience.
It’s all organic – no matter how small or how big your brand is, you’ll have to invest your time to listen and reply to your audience.
While there’s no shortcut to it – you can make this whole “customer engagement” process a whole lot easier by using a great tool – and that’s what we will be talking about today!
To increase customer satisfaction and keep them engaged. You need a systematic approach that progresses through several stages.
Here’s how customer engagement tools can help with every stage:
In the first stage, the potential customers learn about your brand and get acquainted with it through different channels. Tools such as Statusbrew or Hootsuite can help streamline the scheduling and social media management process and contribute to your brand visibility.
In the next stage, as customers begin to take an interest in your products or services, engagement tools come into play. You can use email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or Sendible to run targeted email campaigns and can use Google Analytics to get insights regarding the user interactions on your site.
In the third stage, customers usually assess if what you’re offering is meeting their needs. You can use tools like LiveChat or Intercom that help you chat with your audience in real time by answering their queries and addressing their concerns.
This is the stage where the customer usually makes the decision of whether to purchase or not. At this point, e-commerce tools like Shopify can help you ensure a streamlined purchase process from cart management to secure payment completion.
Based on the customer journey, we have picked seven such social media customer engagement tools that will help you increase audience engagement:
Statusbrew’s Engage Inbox makes it one of the best customer engagement tools on social media – where you can get notifications about every comment, reaction, and DM from all your channels into a single dashboard. When you receive a notification, you don’t even need to leave your Engage dashboard and can reply directly from there.
Using the Rule Engine and Sentiment Analysis, you can also filter & automate the actions on different types of conversations you receive in your inbox – ensuring spam & trolls can’t affect your online reputation.
If you’re working with your team, you can also assign different conversations to different team members for faster and more accurate responses.
Hootsuite Inbox keeps you updated with all the conversations across different channels including messages, mentions, comments, and more. It gives you a complete bird’s eye view of all the public activities on your social channels and lets you set up alerts based on your priority.
Thanks to the consolidated dashboard – you can respond much faster, set up auto-replies, and collaborate with team members across channels easily. There are also auto-routing features where you can auto-assign conversations to different team members for better engagement scopes.
Sprout Social offers you a consolidated inbox to simplify your workflows with a centralized platform enabling internal collaborations and providing you with extensive customer insights.
With its Salesforce service cloud integration, you can also centralize all your customer conversations so that your agents can have an optimized view.
That’s not all – but you also receive Message Spike Alerts right in your Sprout Inbox to address the customer needs quickly. There’s also the feature to tag important messages for easy sorting and faster resolutions – making it an ideal social media customer service software.
Meltwater offers a unified inbox that brings in all your comments and direct messages from all your social channels into a single dashboard. This makes it easy for you to check out everything in one place and respond immediately without switching to another tab.
The best part is, you can moderate or respond to a comment directly or even assign it to another team member using Meltwater‘s workflow tools, and can even filter your messages easily to prioritize and streamline the entire process.
Even if you are not tagged in a conversation on social media, but your brand is mentioned – the unified inbox will also bring those mentions outside your own social channels in your dashboard so that you can always keep an eye on your online reputation.
Besides, it also lets you view a complete history of prior interactions with every individual. So that you already have a clue about who you have interacted with before and in what context.
Buffer is one of the most convenient social media engagement tools that you will find because of its intuitive interface and design.
In Buffer’s dashboard, you can view all your unserved comments and even see them in highlights so that you never miss out on any. They also offer a grid view to see which posts have unanswered comments – helping you quickly jump from one post to the other.
Buffer also lets you set up smart alerts for important comments or negative sentiments so that you can address them immediately before they tarnish your brand’s reputation.
Brandwatch Engage lets you connect with your customers from one central inbox – giving you the flexibility to hike your engagement rates with faster replies. You can see your incoming messages organized in feeds, which are columns for content items, according to the filters that you set up.
The tool also gives you the flexibility to re-order and resign your Engage feed by using the drag-and-drop feature. You can even sort your content as you wish from newest to oldest and can even delete the feed and create a new one from scratch.
If you are looking for a tool that can help you easily manage all your organic and post comments, mentions, and messages, then Agorapulse is the one with its single centralized inbox management. In this tool, you also get an Inbox Assistant, which can help organize your inbox from recent notifications to older ones automatically.
Agorapulse is also great if you want to work with teams because you can assign conversations share them organize them with your team and even label specific conversations.
Now that you know which is the best customer engagement tool for social media – it won’t be hard for you to choose one based on your requirements, budget, and ease of use. If you are working with a team – don’t forget to ask for their opinions as well!
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A self-proclaimed Swiftian, Instagram-holic, and blogger, Subhasree eats, breathes, and sleeps pop culture. When she is not imagining dates with Iron Man on Stark Tower (yes, she has the biggest crush on RDJ, which she won’t admit), she can be seen tweeting about the latest trends. Always the first one to break viral news, Subhasree is addicted to social media, and leaves out no opportunity of blogging about the same. She is our go-to source for the latest algorithm updates and our resident editor.
