Supporting Customers With Facebook: What Businesses Need to Know

Are your customers active on Facebook?

Have you got a plan to support your customers via Facebook?

To learn how to use Facebook to support customers, I interview Mari Smith.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Mari Smith, the world's leading Facebook marketing expert. She co-authored Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day and is author of The New Relationship Marketing. Mari also teamed up with Facebook to assist in educational events.

Mari will explore a few new updates from Facebook and how to use Facebook for customer service and support.

You'll discover how to create a good Facebook experience for your customers.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Supporting Customers With Facebook
Recent Updates: Instant Articles and Facebook Messenger

Mari believes Instant Articles were inspired by the video autoplay function on Facebook. Instant Articles, which make content more appealing, enticing and engaging, are only visible on the iPhone at this time.

Introducing Instant Articles, a new tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook.

Posted by Facebook Media on Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Currently there are only nine media partners that can create Instant Articles, which are posts that come alive with audio and movement on the page (animation, video). The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Guardian and BBC News are some of the publishers creating these interactive articles.

Mari also shares about the changes to Facebook Messenger.

At the F8 Conference in March 2015, Facebook announced they're opening up the Messenger API. This means any third-party developer can create an app that will work with Messenger. So if someone sends you a link to something in a Facebook message, it may ask you to install an app when you click on it.

Messenger is also integrating with businesses, although there are only a few online merchants doing this as of now. With this functionality, when people make a purchase, Messenger will ask them if they want to get updates for this merchant via Facebook Messenger. That's almost as good as having a person's cell phone number, Mari explains, because there's a high open rate for SMS messages.

Using this technology, merchants can make purchase recommendations or send shipment updates via Messenger, for example. It basically opens up the dialog between the business and the customer.

Listen to the show to hear how Instant Articles are similar to LinkedIn Publisher.

Why businesses should use Facebook for customer service

Mari believes Facebook should be part of a business's customer service plan, since most people are already on Facebook and many use Facebook through mobile devices.

Mari talks about how she was recently interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article on how companies like JP Morgan and Coca-Cola are turning off voicemail, and cutting millions of dollars in expenses by doing this. Mari thinks it's a sign of the times. The biggest challenge for businesses is that customers have so many different ways to contact them: a tweet or DM on Twitter or a Facebook wall post, comment or direct message. It can be unwieldy.

Companies should also look at the features recently added for business pages on Facebook. The newest call to action button on ads is "Call Now." Facebook wants people to call businesses. They realize if a phone is in someone's hand, they can just press the Call button. The challenge is businesses would need to have staff on standby or a system in plac...