How Twitter Stats Help Build Effective Customer Support Strategies

Social media has become a primary customer support interface for brands. Twitter is leading the way, with users posting brand-related questions and complaints, often tagging a company’s Twitter handle in the tweet. Twitter has reported that 64% of users prefer to contact a dedicated support handle on the platform rather than call a business for customer support. These sort of Twitter stats are invaluable as brands decide how to implement customer support strategies in the age of social media.

Brands have access to a variety of valuable Twitter stats that can inform customer support strategies. The platform provides its own analytics, including data on which of a brand’s tweets are generating the most clicks, likes, retweets, and replies; the volume of mentions of a brand by other users; and increases or decreases in followers over different time periods.

Each of these Twitter stats can provide useful consumer insights that help craft successful customer support strategies. In many cases the key is contextualizing brand engagement to recognize potentially negative content and implement a proactive response.

For example, if a tweet posted by a brand’s official handle is receiving a high volume of clicks and replies, it is crucial to recognize the emotional content of the replies. Clicks and replies may not indicate a positive response. Using social monitoring tools such as NetBase Quid AI’s sentiment analysis, brands can go deeper into Twitter stats and recognize posts with negative language. Sentiment analysis uses techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) and image analysis to determine whether a post is negative, and to determine the strength of the emotional response conveyed. It is crucial to recognize Tweets with negative content so they do not stay visibly unaddressed for all of a brand’s or user’s followers to see.

While some brands might find it problematic that social media platforms like Twitter provide a particularly visible forum for complaints and bad reviews, confident brands can embrace the visibility of Twitter to display customer support successes.

Taking the time to respond to an individual’s negative tweet can show a brand’s other followers that it values each individual customer’s particular concern. In addition, when a customer support response receives positive feedback from the original poster or others on Twitter, the brand benefits from a public display of its commitment to customer support. This is a far cry from a customer support call that will go unheard by all but the individual customer involved.

To recognize these customer support opportunities, a brand needs to analyze Twitter stats to find customers who need assistance and whose questions can be answered quickly and effectively on such a public platform.

Understanding the sheer volume of mentions will not do here. Twitter stats should be analyzed in tandem with social monitoring built to recognize positive and negative sentiment. Thanks to powerful AI tools like sentiment analysis, brands can sort through the mass of brand-related content on Twitter to monitor for individual negative tweets and formulate quick and directed responses.

Sentiment analysis can also help brands track positive feedback to their customer support responses. If a particular sort of language or strategic approach tends to generate positive feedback, technology such as NetBase Quid AI can analyze Twitter stats to recognize these trends. Brands can then construct and adapt future customer support strategies to mirror what has been effective in other cases.

Twitter stats are of course directly applicable to activity on Twitter, but brands should recognize that analyzing the effectiveness of their customer support strategies on Twitter can have effective carry-over to strategies used on other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

A brand can use Twitter stats to identify specific products or locations that tend to need more customer support. This understanding should inform how a brand approaches social monitoring on other platforms, as it can pay closer attention to those products or locations.

The value of customer support on Twitter is clear. According to the Harvard Business Review, customers who had a customer support interaction on Twitter were more likely to pay more for a company’s services and more likely to choose that company over a competitor. Using Twitter stats, brands can identify opportunities for these productive customer support interactions, and they can apply the insights gained to their broader customer support strategies.