How to do social media customer service: Best practices in 2025
Getting social media customer service right is crucial as this can impact brand trust, credibility and loyalty. Therefore, you should follow social media customer service best practices to ensure you are providing the best support to your audience via social media.
We all know how useful and powerful social media can be for brands in terms of growth, engagement, and sales but it’s also important to understand that social media is also an effective way to provide customer service. Therefore, your brand should be investing in including social media customer service in your paid social strategy.
To understand why your brand should pay attention to social media customer service and the best practices you should follow to ensure customer service satisfaction, read on!
What is social media customer service?
Social media customer service is the process of providing support to your audience and customers via social media platforms. This could include dealing with negative reviews in public comment sections or direct messages, customers needing product/business information and/or technical assistance.
Why is social media customer service important?
People want good social media customer service; over 60% of customers believe a positive customer experience is more important in terms of buying decisions than the price. If customers are actively looking for this, then you need to provide it so you stay ahead of the competition and keep your audience engaged.
Businesses need customers to remain loyal and maintain their purchasing behaviour. 75% of customers stated they would be loyal to a brand that showed exceptional customer support. Therefore, investing in customer service is crucial when advertising on social media, so your brand appeals to new customers as well as making sure customers stay loyal.
Engaging with your audience via social media is also an effective way to boost social visibility and build brand awareness. High engagement rates can improve your brand’s organic performance. The more people that see your brand’s social media profiles, the higher your chances of increasing followers and building your community.
Top 10 social media customer service best practices
1. Act promptly (to both positive and negative comments)
By providing social media customer service quickly, you can deal with and solve customer issues before they become bigger issues or the customer feels ignored. Therefore, it is important to regularly monitor your comments and direct messages.
Positive user experience is extremely important in the customer decision-making process, so providing a fast service will help you increase engagement and ultimately boost sales. It is also important to respond to positive comments/messages quickly; this can make the user feel valued and encourage them to share more positive feedback in the future.
2. Understand the importance of social listening
Social listening is a powerful market research tool that can provide you with valuable insights that can inform your social media customer service strategy. If you know how your brand is perceived by your audience and industry, you can actively improve aspects of your brand that receive negative feedback and provide a more positive customer experience. Being aware of how your audience’s thoughts and opinions change over time, allows you to respond quickly to any customer queries.
3. Consider creating a social media account solely for customer service
This mainly applies to larger brands that are growing at a fast rate. It can be hard to keep track of and respond to all customer service-related comments especially when you are receiving a large amount of more general engagements on your posts. Therefore, having a separate social media account where users can go to and receive direct feedback could be beneficial.
Top tip: if you are going to create a separate customer service account, the username should be similar to your main account with a keyword like ‘help’ or ‘support’ included.
4. Be honest with your audience
Although it is essential to respond quickly, we understand that sometimes you can’t reply within a matter of minutes; it just isn’t realistic and that is ok. Setting expectations can help improve the customer experience too. Be transparent with your audience and set a time frame of when they can expect an answer from you.
In the same way, if you can offer speedy customer service shout about that too. This can make you stand out from competitors and attract more potential customers.
It is also important to be honest in your replies too. If it will take you time to deal with the issue, be honest about that. Brand trust is essential when it comes to generating sales online, so being as transparent with your audience as possible will help you build this.
5. Utilise AI to help you manage customer service on social media.
90% of marketers are using AI automation for customer interactions. If your competitors are providing customer service at scale by using AI tools, it could leave you at a disadvantage if your strategy doesn’t take this into account.
However, your customers must be provided with a personalised experience and AI can take that away. Using AI for repetitive admin tasks related to customer service whilst also providing personalised responses to individual customers is the best way to provide effective customer service on social media.
6. Monitor social media customer service analytics
A successful social media customer service strategy should be based on real data. By monitoring and tracking customer service metrics, you can refine your social media strategy to ensure you are providing the best customer experience. Some customer service metrics include:
- Message volume
- Average response time
- Customer satisfaction score
7. Respond to negative feedback privately
Although it is important to respond to negative feedback, it is not beneficial to do this publicly. In a direct conversation, you can discuss any problems in detail and provide necessary information that might not be appropriate to share publicly.
By doing this, the user is likely to feel valued and heard as they feel they are speaking to a human rather than a ‘brand’.
8. Be accessible
Social media in itself is an accessible way for you to provide customer service directly to your customers. However, you can also be more accessible on social media to better the customer experience. For example, using accessible language, providing digestible information and replying to everyone are effective ways to be accessible.
The more accessible you are with your customer service, the better your audience experience will be and the better reputation your brand will have.
9. Reply to everyone
As mentioned briefly above, you should aim to reply to everyone; not just the positive comments and not just the negative ones. By listening, responding and making each user feel seen/heard, you can effectively build your online community and in turn create a stronger online presence.
Ultimately the more you respond to comments, the more people will engage with your brand and by having more engagement you have on your posts, you can increase brand awareness and reach. It’s a win-win.
10. Be consistent with your tone of voice
When it comes to success on social media in general, having a consistent tone of voice that reflects your brand values and aligns with your brand identity is very important. A consistent tone of voice not only promotes brand credibility and encourages brand trust, but also humanises your brand, so your audience remains connected to your brand.
Building long-lasting relationships with your customers is crucial for growing a business and getting your tone of voice right in your social media customer service is an effective way to do this.
Need support with your social strategy?
Get in touch with our team of social experts and let’s work together to drive the results you want. Whether it’s support with your social media customer service or any other aspect of social media for your business, Embryo is here to help. We look forward to hearing from you.
