Instagram and Facebook Automations By KwikEngage

Recap: Why Social Media Engagement Is Important

Social media has taken the world by storm, whether it is for personal use or for engaging with brands that consumers like. Today, customers prefer to interact with brands via social media channels, direct messages, messengers, and posts. In this section, we look at why social media engagement is so important for brands in 2024.

1. Social Media Influences Purchase Decisions

Social media is a goldmine for social proof, reviews, and recommendations. These influence customers in a big way, helping them avoid products or make purchase decisions.

For instance, people share reviews and recommendations on Instagram and Facebook posts stories. Studies show that customers trust reviews by other customers 12 times more than those shared by brands. Hence ensuring social media accounts are updated and active, running influencer marketing campaigns and social media ads can help influence consumer behavior.

2. Increases Sales

Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are also utilized for social commerce, where customers can buy products from these social platforms. Think Facebook marketplace and Instagram shoppable posts. Apart from these, brands also utilize social media platforms to create strong relationships with customers, leading to more sales opportunities in the long run.

3. Improve Brand Awareness

95% of the world’s population now uses social media platforms. The more brands stay active and create engagement on social media, the better their audience reach and brand awareness. Most customers start product searches on social media platforms. With easy sharing options, consumers also tend to share their favourite brands and products with their friends and family via social media.

4. Boost Customer Engagement

Customers often tend to interact with brands via social posts and stories. For example, when they want to know product price or more details, they comment on product posts. Conversely, customers share product reviews and brands acknowledge them on social media. Brands can also track and measure customer sentiment via social channels.

Example

5. Build A Quality Contact List

With DM automations, you can build a contact list of genuine leads. You can also reconnect and engage with these leads to improve sales. DM automations can also help you sift through leads, segment leads, and drive sales by one-on-one interactions with leads.

Social Media Automations To Boost Engagement

There’s a lot you can do via your social media channels to engage customers. But you do not have to do everything manually. Automation features designed for social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook have made it easy for brands, leading to enhanced customer experience.

Micro Journeys And Story Automation

We all buy products and try out things that are new in the market. And many times we end up liking our new purchases so much that we feel like sharing them on social media so that our friends could also explore the products.

For instance, we may create a photo or video story and share it on Instagram or Facebook and tag the brand too. For brands, this is an excellent opportunity to engage with the customers who mention the brand in their stories.

Conversely, many customers engage with brands via stories when brands post about products, asking about prices or other details. These are instances when story automation helps brands to boost engagement and sales.

Story Automation Use Cases

There are many ways to use Instagram and Facebook stories to generate more engagement. Automation can help you create more engagement by putting in less manual effort throughout the day. Here are some use cases of the story automation feature.

1. Offer Discounts To Customers Who Feature Your Products

Say a customer recently bought a product from your site and has posted a story tagging your brand. Offer the customer a discount code for their next purchase. This way, you can ensure the customer will come back to your store for more, boost sales, and lay a foundation for building long-term loyalty with the customer.

2. Offer Incentives When Shoppers Engage With Your Stories

When shoppers inquire about your product price or other details such as variations available, delivery date, etc., or when they reshare your stories and tag you, give them incentives such as free shipping, a discount coupon, or something else. This will help boost engagement and grow relations with customers.

3. Run Polls And Quizzes Through Stories And Posts

Interactive content such as polls and quizzes increases engagement by 52.6%. Polls are short, quick, interesting and engaging. They make customers think and perform an action, which leads to engagement. Moreover, you can automate incentives or prizes for people participating in your polls and quizzes, which would lead to more engagement. Here are some ways to use polls to increase engagement:

Get customer feedback through poll questions
Conduct market research for your products
Collect data via polls to repurpose in content
Generate leads for sales

Example:

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DM Automations

When customers reach out to brands with queries or problems, their experience can easily turn bad if they don’t receive the right response or if the response is delayed. This is where a feature like DM automation can be a game-changer.

With this feature, brands can automate responses to customer interactions in direct messages. For instance, brands can use it to manage influencer collaboration messages, conduct quizzes, automate FAQ responses, etc.

DM Automation Use Cases

Automating DMs can help marketers save time, enhance customer experience, reduce repetitive tasks, and lead to more conversions, etc. Here are a few DM automation use cases that can have an overall positive impact on your eCommerce business.

1. Managing Influencer Collaboration Messages

69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations and 75% of people use social media for product recommendations. There’s an increasing demand for social media influencers. That is why influencer marketing is a must-have for eCommerce brands. The good news is, that brands can automate their influencer marketing campaigns with the help of DM automation.

For instance, when customers respond to influencers’ posts via DM, they can receive automated responses set up by the brands. For example, if someone responds to a post asking for the price of a product, your DM automations can take over the task of responding in real-time, without you having to intervene.

Example

Source 2. Facilitating Returns And Exchanges

Another excellent way to use DM automation is to facilitate returns and exchanges. Most people buy products after looking at the return and exchange policies of brands. Easy return policies make customers trust a brand more and increase customer satisfaction. These factors lead to more sales. With automated DMs related to returns and exchanges, customers’ experience becomes even better.

Here’s how you can use DM automation for returns and exchanges:

Set up automated DM responses for FAQs related to returns and exchanges
If a customer is unhappy with a purchase experience and wants to initiate a return, offer them a discount coupon for their next purchase. This way you can increase the chances of them returning to your store
Set up automated notifications and alerts related to exchanges with the help of DM automation

3. Answering Frequently Asked Questions

One of the best ways to respond to customers’ queries is to have an FAQs section on your website. However, it may not be possible on social media channels. But with customers preferring to use social media to shop for and browse products, how do you tackle this challenge? The answer is DM automations.

With multiple customers asking the same questions, it may get tedious for you to manually respond to each individual question. DM automations can make this easy for you. Use DM automation for FAQ to respond to questions asked on stories, feeds, reels, Instagram live, ads, and more.

Social Media Automations: Best Practices To Follow

To make the most of automation features, use this checklist of best practices.

Create multiple opportunities for engagement with customers
Once you set up automations, ensure you monitor and examine its performance from time to time
Ensure you create automations that cover the entire customer journey, from awareness to discovery to conversion and checkout
Ensure the checkout process is easy and smooth
Set up story automation, DM automation, among other automation
Keep abreast with social media trends, trending topics, and advanced features to incorporate automation into your social strategy

Get Started With Social Media Automation For More Customer Engagement

Automation has a lot of potential to improve engagement on your social media channels. Not just engagement, it can also help increase brand awareness, product discovery, consideration and conversion. In short, you can improve customer engagement throughout the customer journey, leading to easy checkout.

To ensure an easy and fast checkout process on your eCommerce store, explore Kwik Checkout.

Book a free Kwik Checkout demo to know more.