Tapping into your target audience and finding out what they think is easier than ever thanks to the rise of social media.
Of course there are actually a few different options for collecting customer feedback in this context, so here is a look at just a few of the most effective ways to go about it.
Monitor brand mentions with specialist software
If you want to know what people are saying about your business even if they are not tagging in your official social accounts, then you need to get out there and search for mentions of your brand manually.
This can be time consuming, so using monitoring software is a quicker and more efficient option. In fact the automatic collection of customer feedback is one of the main reasons why you need a social media monitoring tool in the first place.
As well as pinpointing customer complaints and concerns and allowing you to respond quickly, you can also see how your brand is perceived and adjust your social strategies accordingly to make improvements thanks to this method.
Make use of integrated user poll functions
Lots of the biggest social media services, including Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, all have polling capabilities baked into their core set of features.
This makes it straightforward to create a post which is built around generating feedback from customers, whether you want to ask a simple yes-no question, or you are intending to create a multiple choice poll.
You can even integrate these polls with innately interactive elements, such as the Stories function on Instagram, which means that they are more likely to be discovered by your followers, and to be engaged with when they are encountered.
Link to third party survey platforms
There are limits to what you can achieve with the built-in survey capabilities of social media sites, so feel free to create polls on more fully-featured platforms and link to these via your social accounts.
You should always make sure that the surveys you share with your followers are both relevant to their interests and also composed in such a way as to be easy to use and clearly comprehensible. The more intriguing a poll seems at the outset, the more likely a follower will be to click through and actually complete it.
Offer incentives
As you might expect, you will have more success with courting customers to receive feedback if they have an incentive for interacting.
This incentive could take whatever form you wish, whether you want to enter participants into a prize giveaway, or provide them with an exclusive discount code to use at your online store.
Harness DMs
Plenty of customers will prefer to communicate with your business through direct message rather than through a public post on social media, and this will give you yet another opportunity to fish for feedback.
It is a bad idea to contact followers out of the blue with a DM that links to a survey or other type of feedback form, as this could seem like an invasion of their privacy if it is unprompted. Instead, it is better to only ask for feedback in the wake of a user-initiated interaction, such as after they have asked a question or requested help.
Final thoughts
Any business can use social media to get customer feedback; the key is to make sure that you do so in the right way, and being willing to make changes if your attempts to engage with your followers fall flat is the most valuable ability you can have.
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