Social media started as a device for tracking information that’s relevant to your line of business. It then became an important tool for monitoring web traffic. And now, people are using it to better digital experiences.
How – you ask?
First, social media, as we know, it is a noisy place. A lot is going on. Users are getting bombarded with lots of content from every possible corner, and it’s easy for them to get overwhelmed. And when this happens, they’ll simply tap away and go elsewhere to look for content that’s more relevant or resonates with them better.
But there exist a couple of things that might entice a social media user well enough and make them hang around for longer. Among them is a well thought out message. So great visuals used alongside easy-to-under-stand copy could be another reason users don’t hop out of your social media page with such haste.
Worth mentioning is a convincing call to action. You read that right – you can easily get your social media users to stay around for longer by coming up with a CTA tag they’ll have a hard time resisting.
Or it could be a mishmash or synergy of all the elements we’ve mentioned – consistent visuals, relevant messages, and useful notifications that speak in the same tone as your users.
Where User Experience (UX) Comes in
Both social media and UX don’t operate in a vacuum. Neither do they rely on a single channel such as an app, website, or page.
Users move through a series of channels, each of which is designed to align with user experience with reference to what they read, what they see, and how they react or interact with it.
As a UX designer, you have to integrate all these channels and the manner at which business people use them to communicate with users. People use social media to drive traffic to their website and hardly do they return the same favour, not on the same scale.
It’s, therefore, safe to say we’re the sole beneficiaries of the relationship that exists between web owners and social media. It’s through social media that we’re able to interact with our followers, fans, and connections.
Read this bearing in mind that these are not faceless avatars, but intelligent individuals with the ability to make decisions based on what’s good for them.
Social media has its grip on a broad range of varied insights that you could take advantage of today and improve how your users interact with your site. So why would anyone want to shy away from integrating it with their website?
By integration, I’m not talking about throwing in a few social sharing buttons, and that’s it. There’s always more. I’m talking about taking advantage of the hundreds of thousands of your prospects voices that roam freely through social media. I’m talking about how you can take advantage of this power and use it to create a stunning user experience that will be blowing your conversions to the roof.
Passwords are hard to remember. You want to do a simple transaction online, and then it hits you that you can’t remember the login details of that account. This is a common problem than you think, and statistics are here to support it.
About 69% of online consumers have admitted to forgetting their password when they needed to access an account and buy something.
So the question to ask is, “why would you want to subject your users to such frustrations?” No one enjoys filling registration forms where they have to enter their name, choose a username (try several of them before they find one that’s still available), and afterward choose a password they aren’t even sure if they’ll still remember the following day.
The good thing is that social media has an easy solution for this. Instead of forcing your users to registers afresh, you can let them enter your website through social media. All they have to remember is their social media logins, and that’s pretty much like it.
Social login is the ultimate solution for this that you wouldn’t want to pass up. What you need is a social login provider such as Login Radius, and you’ll have more than 30 different social network channels that your users can use to access your site. So long as they remember the login to any of the social sites, they should be able to access your site without encountering any form of trouble.
Learn About your Users and Personalise your Campaign
Before social media, targeting a user was pretty much a gamble. The only way to gather customer information was through surveys and registration forms, which didn’t provide much info, save for your customers’ location and name.
And most of the time, the data collected was plainly wrong or misleading, as most users were sceptical about disclosing too much of their info online. They were more concerned about their privacy, and would not be hesitant to lie if it meant protecting themselves.
But social media appears to have changed a lot of things, and people are now finding it easy to reveal private details of their life. All you need is some little bit of digging, and you’ll be presented with an overwhelming amount of information about your users. For instance, you can easily find out about their age, gender, location, hobbies, favourite type of music, marital status, and so forth.
With some social login tools, you’ll even be granted direct access to their social profiles across different social media platforms, in a simplified format you can easily analyse.
There’s more than you can do with the information that you collect. For instance, you can use the insights you get to craft a witty product recommendation. You can even design gender-specific banners.
You can come up with two separate banners that speak to each gender on the level that users of that specific gender can relate best.
The information you get allows you to target them based on their interests. Are your followers into antique stuff? Use these items to grow their interest or get them to pay attention to your business.
Are you planning on selling phone cases? You can use this information to find users that appear to have bought their phones recently.
People don’t trust adverts that much, and that’s because they’re always biased in favour of the advertiser. They only focus on what’s good, with little to no information divulged on the negative aspect of your offerings.
So while advertisements are meant to inform, they’re not a trustworthy source of information. So where do users find the information they can trust and use it to influence their buying decision?
Reviews and recommendations – online users rely on the recommendations they receive from their family and friends. They also depend on other online users for reviews.
Unless you’re new to your line of business, you should have a list of customers that will be willing to share the experiences they’ve had with your products or services with the rest of the world. Were they satisfied with the quality of your products? Are your adverts honest, or are you just trying to sell snake oil?
Online users trust reviews more than anything. It’s what they use to find out what lies in store for them should they decide to go ahead and trust you with their money.
Focus on inspiring confidence in your users by providing them with real reviews from customers you’ve served in the past. You can even integrate these reviews on your site and boost your credibility.
In so doing, you’ll be able to increase the number of conversions that you’re getting with little convincing on your part. It’s also important that you remind your users to leave their feedback behind. They can either do it directly on your site or your social media page.
People love sharing whatever content they find interesting. That explains why certain posts go viral. A user stumbles across a post that tickles their fancy, and the next thing they’ll be doing is sharing it on their timeline for the whole world to see.
It’s ingrained in us, and the best thing you can do as a marketer is to take advantage of this one natural human trait that’s hard-coded in us.
The easiest way to go about this is to make it easy for them to share your post on social media. You can start by installing social share buttons on your site. Make sure it shows on every single one of the posts you make.
All that a user has to do to share your posts around is click on the icon. Don’t take the lazy approach of only including the icons on your header and footer. If anything, the social sharing icon must appear on every single one of your posts and pages.
Keep in mind that your users are not just sharing the post to themselves. But to their friends and followers, which translates to free visibility on your part.
Another simple trick you could use is to start sharing the purchases made on social media. Of course, you have to ask for permission first from the user before you can go ahead and post them.
Don’t complicate it — just something simple along the lines of “we’re glad to have served so and so today. The transaction went on fine. Should you feel like trying our products or services in the future and are looking for reviews, so and so is one of our clients that you can contact for honest reviews.”
Easy and Quick Checkout
Ever wondered why many of your prospects abandon their carts midway? It turns out this is a common trait among a great majority of online shoppers. Confirming this is a recent study finding released by Baymard Institute, which went on to reveal that, on average, about 68% of online prospects abandon their shopping carts midway in a transaction.
Of course, there isn’t a sweeping reason for this. But some potential customers may fall off the buying process because they’re not comfortable with the idea of entering too much of their personal information.
That’s where social media can prove handy. Where your users are already connected to you on social media, you don’t have to prompt them for some of this information. Instead, get them to sign up through a social media account of their choosing, after which they’ll enter their credit card information, and they’re done.
It’s that simple. Another option is to pre-fill some of this information and let your users enter their credit card information only to complete the checkout process.
Do this, and you’ll tremendously reduce the number of users that are falling off in the middle of the checkout process. The point is to make the whole process less taxing and hassle-free.
Reliable Customer Support
Learn to flow with time. As you’re soon to find out, the number of people that reach out to businesses with their queries via a call help desk or email is on a downward spiral. That’s because things are changing, and customers are finding it more convenient for them to contact you on social media instead.
I like to think of social media as an all-rounded marketing tool. You can use it for promotional purposes. You can also use it to keep track of your online progress and so forth.
Social media is also a great relationship tool. Should you feel like one of your customers is upset or frustrated with anything; all you have to do is reach out to them and offer them the necessary assistance. You don’t even have to do it privately unless you’re dealing with personal issues that you might want to keep off the public domain.
With customers’ service tools such as Zendesk, it’s even possible to integrate social media into their customer care service.
Create a social media marketing team that will be responding to your customers’ concerns in the required amount of time. It’s even better if you make it instant. Customers want to be sure that their issues will be addressed with no time delays on your end.
Enhancing user experience by applying the above tips will enable you leverage the profitable digital marketing space. Be different and impress your website visitors by using social media chatbots. The chatbots allow businesses to communicate effectively with website visitors.
But before we look at the different types of chatbots and factors you should consider before developing one for your website, let us briefly look at how the chatbots work.
First, every social media site has different features tailored to endear it to the target customers. That is why it’s essential to have a custom social media marketing strategy for each platform – there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.
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Facebook Messenger
A select group of digital marketers is of the idea that chatbots will soon become obsolete. We beg to differ; as Google and other search engines develop ways of monitoring user experience offered by websites, chatbots will come in handy to increase dwell time and foster communication between brands and potential customers.
The Facebook team predicts that more digital marketers and web developers will incorporate the platform’s chatbot on their websites to increase conversions.
A recent article published by David Marcus, the head of Facebook Messenger, stated that savvy online customers expect a messaging experience when they visit business websites. The live chat becomes more effective in creating a rapport if it’s something that the customers are familiar with.
Facebook Messenger is estimated to have more than 900 million active users. So, communicating it on your Facebook page and having it on your website will spur engagement. The real-time communication will give you an excellent opportunity to address any concerns or queries they may have regarding your brand.
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WhatsApp
A recent study revealed that 80% of small and medium businesses in Brazil and India use WhatsApp to communicate with their customers. Because the audience is already conversant with the mobile application, it’s easy for companies to kickstart a conversation.
Another study by ProfitBooks highlighted how businesses use WhatsApp chatbots to send follow-up messages instead of phone calls. It’s indicated that this application results in 40% more positive responses than direct marketing phone calls.
You can use it to run a marketing campaign involving the customers sending information about what you offer. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise conducted a WhatsApp campaign a few months ago through the chatbot. The company asked its audience to send photos of ingredients in the fridge in return for recipe suggestions.
Of course, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise was one of the key ingredients in the recipes. The campaign, which was dubbed WhatsCook, helped the brand to gain exposure and engage with the customers at a deeper level.
Look into your business for ideas on how to run a similar campaign. Make sure that you publish posts about it on all the social media channels to attract many participants. More importantly, make it easy for the target customers to participate. That means it should be transparent and not complicated.
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Twitter Chatbot
Twitter is another social media marketing powerhouse that you can use to increase engagement with your customers.
Recently, many digital marketers came up guns blazing, referring to the platform as a marketing spam. One of the primary reasons marketers fail to get tangible results from Twitter marketing campaign is they focus on self-promotion.
Be different by posting relevant and valuable content that not only discusses your brand’s products or services. Follow influential people in your niche and have honest conversations about industry trends. Soon more people will join in the discussion and increase the chances of the thread going viral.
Consider retweeting content that recorded high engagement levels to expand your reach even more. Remember to use trending hashtags to increase the posts exposure on the platform.
Sorry for digressing, back to the Twitter chatbots. They are a must-have for customer success, increasing sales, and enhancing branding efforts. The platform is super effective in achieving these three objectives due to the vast amount of traffic it receives daily from across the globe.
The Twitter analytics page offers valuable insights that you can use to tweak your campaigns to match the needs and preferences of potential customers. Direct communication with customers who are already in the sales funnel and interested in buying will give you a better chance of convincing them that your product or service is the best in the market.
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Instagram Chatbot
Instagram is a visual-oriented social media platform that focuses on helping users socialise via photos, videos, and GIFs. Every month, the platform introduces a host of new features to improve how users, especially businesses, profit from it.
Branded Instagram chatbot allows businesses to offer personalised communication and shopping experiences. The immediate or real-time customer support increases customer engagement and portrays a positive image of the brand.
Direct messages are great, but responding to the same question repeatedly every day will lower your performance as a digital marketer. The DMs don’t have features for grouping customers based on their interests and inquiries.
So far, Instagram is yet to avail chatbots to users who use the platform for marketing, but tech companies can create a custom Instagram bot for you. Here are some of the benefits of investing in a third-party chatbot specifically for Instagram.
- Collect and analyse customer data to create segments based on interests, needs, location, and buying behaviours.
- Provide instant responses even if the user sends the message when you’re offline.
- Send timely push notifications to customers when you respond to their messages.
- Provider cheaper and convenient ways of notifying the customers about promotions and new products available on your website.
Facebook owns Instagram and has already published multiple articles rooting for the adoption of chatbots in digital marketing campaigns. Experts predict that Instagram will soon introduce AI-powered chatbots for businesses.
Before then, consider synchronising your Facebook Messenger with your Instagram account to communicate seamlessly with your audience on both platforms.
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LinkedIn Chatbot
LinkedIn has more than 810 million active members, and it’s available in 200+ countries. Despite the impressive numbers, few B2B and B2C businesses use the platform for marketing and lead generation.
A report by HubSpot shows that the organic traffic to the website from LinkedIn resulted in a 2.74% visitor-to-lead conversion rate. That rate is 277% higher than Facebook and Twitter combined.
Most people use the platform to showcase their career experience and achievements. Unknown to them is that they can tap into the massive traffic it receives per day to generate sales.
Like Instagram, there is no indication that LinkedIn has plans to release a chatbot. But because Microsoft owns it, we may get a smart chatbot soon. For now, synchronise your Facebook Messenger chatbot with your LinkedIn account.
Understanding the Different Types of Chatbots for Businesses
Now that you know the different social media chatbots exist or will soon be launched. Let’s shift our attention to the different types of chatbots for business. Consider using at least one of them on your website to engage with the customers better.
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Customer Service Chatbot
A customer service chatbot is designed to provide accurate and fast responses to questions frequently asked by customers. It’s active round-the-clock ensures that the customers get an answer even after working hours.
If the message is sent when the live support team is offline, the chatbot generates automated messages and relays the question to the customer care inbox. That way, the support team responds to inquiries sent when offline first thing in the morning.
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Branded Chatbot
Branded chatbots are the new generation concierges that help customers locate new products on the website catalogue that match their preferences. Check out Tommy Hilfiger branded chatbot designed to help customers find outfits that match their fashion taste and style.
By clicking on the “Find Your New Look” option, the bot displays questions to collect responses that enable it to know customer preferred taste. It then displays Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes based on the identified preferences.
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Entertaining Chatbot
As the name suggests, an entertaining chatbot is meant to entice the customers to do business with the brand. Media and entertainment companies widely use these kinds of chatbots to promote new films via social media platforms.
Disney incorporated the chatbot on Messenger to market the famous Zootopia film. Universal Picture Homes also used a similar chatbot to popularise the Back To The Future Trilogy on Facebook Messenger.
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E-Commerce Chatbot
eCommerce chatbots are gaining traction online thanks to the global adoption of social commerce. These chatbots have been around for a while, but most companies were hesitant to use them. In 2016, Domino Pizza launched a Messenger Ordering chatbot that allowed customers to order pizza via Messenger.
The modern eCommerce chatbot functions the same way, but you don’t have to exit the chat to pay for the items ordered. Most eCommerce platforms that have embraced the technology require clients to create an account on the main website and provide their credit card information to buy through the bot.
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Assistant Chatbot
Assistant chatbots are similar to the customer service bots earlier discussed. The main difference is that they offer additional valuable information to customers based on the query.
For example, unlike the customer service chatbot that only responds to questions, the assistant chatbot recommends products or services based on the customers’ preferences.
Even though the bots are synchronised with the main website, their main goal is not to sell the products but to help the customers decide which products to buy. They also play the vital role of encouraging the customers to visit the website to get more details about the products.
4 Factors To Consider When Developing Chatbots
Before embarking on developing a chatbot, consider the following four factors to cover all loose ends that could wreak your business.
- Communication Channel
Make sure that the chatbot technology is compatible with the communication channel used by the target audience. You stand a better chance of increasing website user experience if you deploy the bot on platforms that the customers use, such as Telegram, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger
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Ability to Provide Responses Based on Type of Interaction
An automated and cold response is the last thing a target customer wants and expects from you when in a stressful situation. Most of the pre-recorded messages played up to customers when they call the support team often worsen the situation.
Therefore, gauge the chatbot’s ability to provide correct responses to potential customers in stressful or emotionally draining situations. Also, avoid using the chatbot in situations that require sympathy and empathy.
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Impact on Website User Interface
Visuals and text displayed on the website evoke certain emotions that determine how customers interact with your business. The chatbot interface is text-based with limited or no visuals whatsoever. The clean nature of the interface may make it invisible to some customers especially if the field colours don’t contrast with the website background and elements.
Based on this fact, it’s important to decide whether the information provided by the chatbot can be visually presented on the website instead of relaying it using a chatbot. Concisely, the chatbot should not make the website user interface and user experience unnecessarily complex.
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Chatbot Natural Language Processing Technology
Chatbots rely on natural language processing technology to correctly interpret the text submitted by customers. They count on artificial intelligence and machine learning to know the users’ intent and consequently fetch the most appropriate response.
The chatbots still have a long way to go before they can have a human-like conversations with website visitors but they are better than keeping customers waiting for responses.
Ensure that the chatbot relies on the best AI technology to have custom engagements with the customers. Test it extensively before deploying it to gauge its ability to offer accurate responses to complex questions and sentences.
The Final Thought
Most of the time, we tend to get so hung on improving our SEO score so we can gain more visibility in the search engines. So we end up forgetting how all this is pointless if we cannot come up with a solid strategy on how to convert the traffic we’ll be driving into real sales.
This post focuses on how you can take advantage of social media and use it to improve user experience. Do you feel like there’s anything we’re missing or is there anything that you’d like us to address? Or it could be that you’re in dire need of our help. Kindly talk to us either through social media or via the contact details provided at our MediaOne Marketing website.
