These days, businesses are investing more in perfecting the customer experience.
We are in a customer-centric economy, where customer opinion is held at the highest standard of value.
That’s why collecting customer feedback is more important than ever.
Collecting feedback allows you to know what your customers think about your brand, your service, and your product; going beyond their simple likes and dislikes and helping you understand and evaluate where you can improve and where you stand among your competition.
Using customer feedback allows your business to support a customer-first model that essentially makes your customers the decision-makers of your company.
Their feedback will inspire the moves your company makes as you grow and evolve. This can greatly benefit all departments and help your business thrive.
There are a lot of great ways to collect customer feedback, including email and website surveys. But one sometimes overlooked method of collecting feedback is by meeting your customers where they are—distributing surveys through social media.
Why social media is a gold mine of customer feedback
Often, we see surveys on business websites or sent to contact lists via email, but there are other ways to distribute a feedback survey from your customers.
Around 2.82 billion people use social media.
And of those 2.82 billion people, many are your customers.
A lot of your customers probably like, follow, or are fans of your business on various social media platforms. And they check those platforms every day—multiple times a day.
So what better place to engage your customers?
Social media is made for engagement, for sharing, for talking and commenting. It’s made for making one’s opinion known to the rest of the world.
So in your efforts to collect feedback from your customers, social media is a great place to be. When you’re collecting feedback on social media, there are several different ways to go about it.
Here are 7 effective (and some outside-the-box) ways to collect customer feedback using your business’s social channels.
1. Post a link to a survey on social sites and blogs
Distributing surveys is one of the best ways to collect feedback from your customers.
Simply posting a link to a survey in a blog post, Facebook status, a Tweet, an Instagram post, or whatever other methods of sharing on any social media platform will increase its visibility and guarantee that a bunch of people will take that survey.
The best part about using social media posts to distribute surveys, however, is also one of its biggest downfalls: response bias.
Those customers who are engaged and choose to take your survey are more often than not going to be the customers that want to share how much they love your business.
That, or they feel quite the opposite. This skews your results.
It’s not only cold or warm feelings that skew results; customers bending the truth, not finishing the survey, etc. can also lead to skewed survey results. When your aim is to collect feedback to use to propel your business, that’s not what you want.
Still, using social media to post links to your surveys will likely produce a huge response; and the more platforms you post to, the more responses you will get, expanding your response pool.
There are also a number of ways to reduce the risk of response bias, so make sure the surveys that you’re posting in order to collect feedback are up to standards.
2. A Facebook post autoresponder
Another way that you can use social media to collect feedback is by using a Facebook tool called a Facebook post autoresponder.
A Facebook post autoresponder is a Facebook Messenger chatbot that will send a direct message to anyone who comments on a Facebook post. You choose the post or set the autoresponder up on all your posts.
By sending a direct message inviting feedback from people leaving comments on your Facebook posts, a business can meet customers where they are and make it easy for them to interact with the business.
Using a Facebook post auto-reply bot leverages your customers that are already engaged with your brand.
The Facebook post autoresponder works by automatically sending a message to anyone who comments on a Facebook post that you set up with one.
All you have to do is create a Facebook post, complete with auto-reply bot, and get people to engage with the post.
This is an example Facebook post that uses a bot autoresponder to private message anyone who comments. Comment on the post yourself to see what happens.
Encouraging comments on a Facebook post can be done in any number of ways such as asking a riddle, offering a discount code, asking a clickbaity question, or running a giveaway.
The more engaging the content, the more people will comment on it. And the more people that comment on it, the more people your auto-reply bot can reach out to.
Here’s an example of an auto-reply bot that invites the user to interact with the bot through a Facebook post riddle.
When the bot responds with the answer to the riddle, you can follow-up with your feedback form or survey.
You might offer Facebook fans a discount code or gift on your Facebook post. Include a “comment below to receive the code!” message in the post so that folks know to comment.
Then, when the bot reaches out, it can ask them to fill out a form or survey in order to receive the discount code.
Then, not only do you have an effective way to collect feedback, but you’ll also rack up your Facebook Messenger contact list to remarket to at a later time.
3. A direct message ask for feedback
Sometimes, customer feedback is the most valuable when it’s highly personal. That highly personal feedback comes from direct conversations with customers.
A way to have direct conversations with customers is by using the direct messaging feature supported in almost all social media platforms.
You can do this manually with a live person sending messages to followers, or you can use a conversational chatbot to automatically collect feedback via direct messaging on your behalf.
In order for a Facebook bot to send a DM to a Facebook user, that person needs to send the business a message first. When that happens, the bot can lead the user through a Facebook Messenger funnel that will help the customer achieve their goals.
A chatbot can be programmed to include feedback collecting at the end of a conversation funnel. There are also other ways that a chatbot can direct message a user, for example, Facebook sponsored messages.
It’s Facebook’s policy that you send automated messages to your business’s Messenger contacts (anyone who previously interacted with your business on Messenger) using the sponsored messages ad type.
A sponsored message is a way to DM an invitation for feedback from your customers you’re connected to in Facebook Messenger.
4. Social media contests
We know that incentives increase survey response rates.
Getting higher engagement is a great stepping stone to collect more customer feedback, from more engaged customers.
One great way to get higher engagement is to implement contests on your social media channels. Use the attention-grabbing nature of contests to collect feedback, as well; for example, to enter the contest, a customer can fill out a survey.
Or send a survey to customers after they enter the contest.
Contests are a sure-fire way to engage customers, especially when you post about and advertise the contests on social media.
5. Instagram stories
One of the most underused but wildly valuable social media platforms available to businesses today is Instagram.
Instagram is for more than simply sharing photos, as well — the Instagram Stories feature is a great way to collect feedback from your customers on one of the most popular apps in the world.
On Instagram Stories, you can collect feedback from your followers by posing questions or polls.
This is done simply by clicking the sticker button after taking a photo while in Story mode. It looks like this:
After you click that, you’ll be brought to a screen that shows you all of the options you can include in your Instagram Story:
There are a couple great options here to use to collect feedback from your customers. For example, you can try posting a poll, like this:
You can use the poll to ask which product or service customers prefer, which business or brand they prefer, what they like, etc., and use the poll answers to fuel your decision making in the future.
You can also pose an open-ended question, giving customers the chance to type out a response:
You can also use this as an opportunity to allow your customers to ask your questions (which is another interesting way to collect feedback).
Instagram Stories features other interesting stickers that you could potentially use to collect feedback, such as guessing games:
6. Social monitoring
Of course, there’s the old tried-and-true method of listening to collect feedback: social monitoring.
If your business is present on social channels, this important because your customers can mention your business account.
The only problem is that it takes quite a bit of time and energy to scroll through your mentions on every social media platform in order to see what people are saying.
There are, however, ways to bypass this issue.
Use platforms like Linkfluence that monitor for brand mentions and measure the sentiment of people talking about your business online.
Invent a hashtag for your business and let your customers, fans, and followers know about the hashtag in posts.
Then, you can monitor that hashtag to see what people say and collect feedback that way. Regardless of how you listen, there will be feedback in mentions of the business online, so definitely listen.
People mentioning businesses on their social media are usually doing so for important reasons; so not only are you able to collect feedback, but you may also be able to put out fires before they start, right wrongs, give apologies when needed, celebrate successes, and more.
There’s no better way to know how your customers feel than to see their thoughts when they aren’t speaking to you directly.
People are more honest, there’s less response bias, and there’s more opportunity to truly understand how they feel about your business. Use a couple of different methods of social monitoring to keep up with your customers.
You’ll likely find some key insights.
7. Facebook chatbot survey template
Direct messaging with your actual customers can be a great open channel for communication.
Of course, sometimes you need a quicker method of collecting feedback. That’s where chatbot surveys come in handy.
Using a Facebook chatbot to actually collect the feedback saves your business time and money while setting you apart from other businesses and increasing your customer satisfaction rates.
People like interacting with chatbots, and are interested in interacting with businesses that use chatbots.
So use this fact to your advantage. Using a chatbot to distribute and collect customer feedback makes the process more interactive and easier to complete.
The benefits of using a chatbot to collect feedback via survey include an easy to fill out, conversational, interactive chat survey format, and the fact that it will always be mobile-friendly.
This way, you can collect feedback from your customers no matter where they are, on the go and regardless of device.
Mobile optimization makes customers more likely to fill out the survey because it will be easier for them to do so. And, as we’ve covered, good customer experience is becoming paramount for good business.
Creating a survey chatbot is easy to do and takes minutes with the right tools.
Key takeaways: collect feedback from customers where they are
The most important lesson to take away here is that, in order to keep up in an economy that is growing increasingly customer-centric, it’s important to collect feedback from customers to find out your current value and how you match up to your competitors.
And your customers are likely on social media.
Using social media to collect feedback from your customers by using engaging posts, surveys, social features, and more will guarantee you valuable feedback from the people who are truly using your product or services.
There are so many different ways to utilize the various social media platforms to your benefit.
It’s as easy as ever to directly engage with your customers—the ones buying your products, using your services, and supporting your business—which means it’s easier than ever to hear their likes and dislikes, their concerns, and their hopes for your business’s future.
So skip the email survey this time around—and try one of these social media customer feedback collection techniques.
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Editor’s note: This article reflects the personal opinions of our guest author.
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