Customer Service

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(Bi, 2017)

Social media changed the game when it comes to customer service, if you don’t want to go through the effort of calling the customer support line, no problem! Just send the company a message via their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook page, whichever they may have. A lot of businesses have made the effort to scan all tweets with their company name and see what consumers may need. A popular one with this is Uber via Twitter, sometimes they’ll mistake satire tweets for real requests, but regardless, they are still ready to lend out top notch customer service. I believe that this is very beneficial for a company’s reputation because there’s times where customers will reach out and never receive a response, this ultimately tarnishes any relationship or reputation that they might have had with the customer. If a business has a social media support team, they actually need to be available for the customer and not to just have a page up for looks (Corcione, 2019, para. 8).

In my first blog post I spoke about the limited edition Animal Crossing Nintendo Switch, along with the console there’s an actual game to go along with it. Animal Crossing: New Horizon is being released internally, in many different countries, there’s a bonus that comes along with the preorder, but for a while, that wasn’t the case in Canada. I have a lot of friends in the United States that have taken advantage of the preorder bonus while I am left with nothing. This caused me to reach out to multiple companies about whether or not they are expecting a preorder bonus, Wal-Mart never got back to me, but EB Games and Best Buy did.

As much as it saddens me to have heard this news, I was still grateful that they could provide me with a response! EB Games actually provided me with inaccurate information but cheers to having some sort of preorder bonus in Canada.

Think about a time you’ve dealt with customer service through social media, did it make it easier to get the assistance you required?

Growing The Business

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(Andrus, 2019)

Now that social media has become such a large part in so many people’s lives, not only do you see people gaining popularity on it, but you see artists getting their work out there, and businesses becoming either networking or attempting to reach their target audience. News tends to spread like a wildfire on social media platforms, if a business can get just one celebrity and/or ‘influencer’, a social media person with a large following, to acknowledge their products and/or business, they’ll get other people looking into them now. The reason that this happens is because they look up or aspire to be this person they’re following; this could be considered the psychological phenomenon of groupthink, people lacking their own creativity and doing what they see what the influencers and/or other followers are doing. One example of a business using an influencer would be Youtube Vlogger, David Dobrik, with Chipotle. In his earlier videos, David would always get his assistant to pick him up Chipotle and that was just something he was known for, a year later they sent him free burritos for a year as well as made a burrito after him; this was so that they could get an ad on his different social media platforms, but more time in his videos which average 10 million views. Chipotle already does well as it is, but releasing this product and partnering with Dobrik, got them a lot more revenue considering his large fanbase.

This just goes to show that Chipotle did what a business should do when trying to make sort of growth for their company, they looked at the target audience and saw something that would be a hit (Rampton, 2014, para. 19).

Customer Engagement

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(Conway, 2017)

I am constantly on social media, seeing companies interact with its customers in so many different ways, attitudes, and tones. There’s some companies that do it right and others that do too much! An example of this would be the brand Planters, part of Heinz, they recently killed off their mascot, Mr. Peanut and introduced Baby Nut ever since the craze of Baby Yoda. This would be an example of attempting to receive customer engagement but not getting a great point across. Whenever we go shopping, we see a can of nuts and think of Mr. Peanut, but now that’s gone in an attempt for a brand to try and get noticed by more people.

A company that has been using social media for customer engagement wonderfully has been Nintendo, they easily market new games and systems where it’s all anyone sees on their timeline for a couple days. They’re not only promoting their products but setting up events for those who are actually buying into it.

This makes it easy for them to really understand the customers they’re dealing with and what will sell and how to make it better. They’ve recently put out a special edition Animal Crossing: New Horizon switch, this system is available for preorder, which has been selling out quickly along with the preorder for the game itself and any accessories associated. 

Although it’s important to interact with customers, what’s most important is keeping long-lasting relationships that are more than just the trend, but rather, what has shaped the relationship to this point (Swinscoe, 2016, para. 9). This something that I believe Nintendo is doing right by going back to their original and liked games, it’s what people grew up with and will never stop loving.

Has there ever been a time where you felt that a business was doing a little too much on social media in order to get attraction from consumers? If so, which company and what were they doing? Are there any companies that you have enjoyed with the way that they manage their social media and customer interactions?

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