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Guest Blog – How Social Media Chatbots Can Help Businesses Target and Generate Leads

Mobile Marketer research found out that nearly 40% of millennials interact with chatbots regularly. As one would expect, an increasing number of business organizations are now using chatbots to fuel their marketing and customer service efforts.

Adding a chatbot to customer support helps brands handle large volumes of inquiries and gives agents more time to focus on more complex issues. Customers can also get instant responses to urgent queries 24/7 which contributes to a better customer experience. While many brands have implemented chatbots through live chat, it’s now becoming increasingly popular and easy to do so on social media too.

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of using chatbots on social media platforms that can help businesses understand their audience, while simultaneously generating more leads and improving website ranking.

First Things First, Why is it Important to Optimize Your Social Media Presence?

It’s no secret how social media gives you the freedom to explore creative opportunities as well as exercise influence on how visitors perceive your brand.

Moreover, Google ranks all the content shared on its platform. Although not impossible, earning a higher rank organically can be very complicated and challenging, especially for companies having limited budgets.

Luckily, social media can work in your favor.

Brands that invest in social media optimization are always going to be ahead of those who don’t. At its most basic, optimizing your social media presence will allow you to diminish negative publicity and accentuate good publicity. Remember that social media is very public, which means that any customer complaints present will be highly visible to other potential customers. 

The good news is that social media is also an excellent marketing tool for promoting products or services, attracting new customers, and driving engagement. When your brand starts getting more prominent in social media conversions, it can boost traffic, increase brand awareness, and generate leads. 

What are Chatbots and Why Are They So Relevant Today?

A chatbot is a computer program or software that starts automated conversations with real people through a messaging app. As for the relevance of chatbots, the World Economic Forum terms the beginning of AI automation as the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The current Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically affected operations, forcing businesses to realign their focus towards online customer engagement. This has also made people realize the usefulness of alternatives like chatbots. 

Since everything is automated, brands don’t need to worry about not being available to their customers. When combined with the efforts of human agents, AI automation can work 24×7, creating a complementary effect without losing that human touch, especially when you have an online business model ready.

How Can Social Media Chatbots Help You Grow Your Business and Generate Leads?

Let’s talk stats: 69% of US residents have said that directly messaging a company makes them feel more confident about the brand. This, in turn, increases customer confidence and loyalty.

That being said, adding a social media chatbot can actually be very advantageous. Let’s take a look how!

  • Uninterrupted Access to Information

Customers expect 24×7 access to things that interest them. So if you want to convert your prospect into customers, you need to strike while the iron is hot – when they’re looking at your products and want more information.

If prospects don’t get this information right away, they might abandon you and go to your rivals. Not only will this affect your conversion rate, but it will result in revenue loss.

While it may not be possible for a human agent to be available round the clock, this isn’t an issue with chatbots. In addition to quick replies, chatbots can even remember customers from the last interaction – both of which can be very beneficial to close sales.

  • Finding Out Crucial Customer Information

Knowing more about your target audience can help you refine your SEO that can improve your website ranking, allowing your content to show up more frequently in search results. Chatbots can enhance your efforts by gathering more information about your website visitors.

You’ll be able to find out crucial information, such as:

  • The kind of people that visit your website
  • The different things your visitors search for
  • Patterns to help you figure out the reasons for their visit
  • The products and services that interest your visitors
  • Frequently asked questions about your product or service that can then help refine your chatbot responses

Knowing more about customers can also help you optimize your marketing strategies. Understanding things like the type of content to publish, topics to focus on, and choosing a blogging platform. After all, not all blogging platforms are created equally, and choosing wrong can negatively affect the whole experience. The ideal blogging platform will fit with your skill level, type of blog, and budget.

  • Revenue Boost Due to Quicker Purchases

Domino’s lets its customers place an order for pizzas directly on Facebook Messenger. Don’t you feel this is more convenient from the customer’s perspective than waiting for a representative to respond when they call a specific outlet?

Due to dynamic lifestyles, customers are more interested in completing their shopping quickly and preferably, without any complications. With online shopping becoming everyone’s go-to option, it’s become necessary for brands to keep up with this trend.

Chatbots let users add their favorites to their shopping carts and then place quick orders. Amazon Echo is a shining example of convenience.

  • Better Visitor Conversion Rates

Chatbot conversion rate is 266% higher than your average social ad, according to research.

In fact, one of the biggest benefits of installing social media chatbots is driving leads. The software provides a better alternative for ongoing, deeper engagement through one-on-one conversations with customers.

  • Encouraging Customers to Take Desired Actions

You can add a strategic call to actions (CTAs) to your bot that can provoke users to take desired actions. This can include reading your blog, taking part in a giveaway or competition, checking order statuses, processing payments, or completing a survey.

Your chatbot can also ask prospects to register their emails. This can be a great tactic to increase your user engagement and the number of subscribers to your email list.

How to Use Chatbots on Different Social Media Platforms?

Every social media platform has a different customer base in terms of basic demographics, purpose, and user behavior, which is why chatbots need to be integrated with all your profiles. 

  • Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger has more than 1.3 billion active users. Additionally, Facebook chatbots have also started attracting growing attention because of their ability to land micro-targeted audiences.

Multiple brands are using the messaging service to create a memorable and immersive experience for their customers through bots. For instance, Disney created a Zootopia chatbot that allowed children to play games using the movie’s fictional characters.

  • WhatsApp for Business

WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion active users, making it the most popular mobile messenger app globally. In fact, ‘WhatsApp for Business‘ has been gaining popularity among businesses since 2017.

Experts have also commented on how following up through WhatsApp instead of direct phone calls gets nearly 40% more responses. After all, people are more likely to respond to personal messages when compared to receiving phone calls from unknown numbers. Hence, having a WhatsApp chatbot can be very efficient to improve customer communication.

Let’s take Hellmann’s WhatsCook campaign as an example. In the campaign, the chatbot asked fans to send in snaps of ingredients from their fridges, and in return, people got recipe suggestions of what they could make from those ingredients.

Using WhatsApp bots will enable you to provide personalized experiences, gather data about your clients, and provide intelligent assistance. Furthermore, you‘ll be able to understand your key customer profiles and prioritize them better using the generated data. 

  • WeChat

WeChat was originally designed as a platform that could be integrated with AI, providing a framework for businesses to easily build bots into their ecosystem. Specifically, WeChat enables businesses to integrate their chatbot interactions into a public account interface as well as through their Mini Program.

  • SMS

It may not be a social media platform, but SMS text messaging also provides an excellent opportunity for engaging customers with chatbots. Engaging customers with SMS can be highly beneficial due to high open and response rates. 

What’s more is that SMS is far more efficient for sending follow-ups, reminders, and alerts than most other social media platforms are because the messages go directly to the customer. 

  • Twitter

Twitter can be an excellent conversational marketing tool – provided you use it the right way. There are several companies that offer Twitter chatbot integration, which you can use for assisting your customers with care and professionalism. Plus, the fact that Twitter has abundant traffic creates exceptional opportunities for launching interactive campaigns. 

The Bottom Line

Today, social media engagement has become a form of validation for brands across the globe. In fact, the more engagement you get on your social media, the most trusted your brand is in the eyes of the public.

So if there isn’t any engagement, your brand is as good as dead.

However, bots can help prevent this. Social media chatbots act as an effective supplement to boost rankings and enhance online reach. While chatbots will never replace customer service teams, they will drive efficiency and boost customer satisfaction when implemented intelligently. You’ll be able to stay one step ahead of your competition and earn greater customer loyalty.

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Nahla Davies

About Nahla Davies

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.