Why should you care about social media response time?

As a non-profit, you can expect a lot of engagement from social media. Social media platforms let you connect with people in real-time. Also, social media gives you the opportunity to know what your audience is interested in, what they feel, what they do, and many other important aspects related to their online behavior.

To yield the best out of your social media platforms, you should strive to maintain an excellent response time. Your audience expects you to respond faster (in real-time). With a quick response time, you can prevent your audience or followers from drawing negative conclusions.

In general, about 80% of your audience expects you to respond to their enquiries within 24 hours and about 40% of social media users want you to respond within one hour.

As a general recommendation, if you can respond to the messages within 5 hours, that is good. However, the faster the response time, the better.

Expectations of your visitors in terms of social media response time

Let’s see what sort of response time your visitors expect from your non-profit’s social media profiles.

Facebook

On average, Facebook pages take around 2 hours to respond to visitors.

However, experts say that majority of the visitors expect you to respond within 30 minutes. Interestingly, more than 50% of the pages fail to maintain such response time. This means that you should respond to your visitors within 30 minutes (the sooner, the better) to win their trust.

In addition to that, Facebook shows another feature called “response rate.” This feature explains the actual percentage of messages your non-profit has responded to. On the other hand, the response time is the time you take to respond to those messages. Those who maintain a response time of 5 minutes for a period of seven consecutive days will earn a badge which states that your page is very responsive to messages. Earning this badge is a sign of credibility for your non-profit.

Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, the average response time is similar to Facebook.

That means organizations usually respond within about 35 minutes. However, like Facebook, your visitors expect you to respond to them in less than 30 minutes. Surprisingly, only 50% of the profiles meet that expectation.

Compared to Facebook, Twitter comes with a more informal approach. Twitter users expect you to reply and tweet them faster than with Facebook. You will see plenty of tweets if you can get a conversation going. Nevertheless, Twitter users don’t expect you to reply with lengthy paragraphs like on Facebook.

Live Chat

It goes without saying that Live Chat is a much faster feature compared to social media or email. So, the vast majority of individuals who want immediate answers prefer using a Live Chat option.

If your non-profit’s website has a Live Chat feature, you should respond to your visitors within 50 seconds. The faster you respond, the better. The other great thing about this feature is that it is usually private – some live chat platforms have the ability to save the chats. So, even if a visitor has some complaint, you can resolve it in a private venue.

A Great Alternative – Chatbots

That’s right, you can create the illusion of a live chat without actually having a human on the other side of it. By taking a look at the types of messages that people are sending you, you can create a chat pod that walks people through and ask the right questions in order to give them the information that you’re most commonly asked.

If an answer isn’t found, you can then leverage the chatbot to ask the person to type in their question or problem and submit that via email to somebody in your organization to reply to. It’s important to let the person know what a typical response time is, so they’re not left wondering when or if they’ll ever hear from you.

At Wow Digital, we have an amazing chat bot that we can deploy for your organization. If you’re interested, book a call with us today and find out about our chatbot package.

The above options are the most widely used social media platforms by non-profits, charities, and the like. You can use these platforms for the betterment of your organization. However, those are not the only channels that allow customers to reach you. Regardless of the medium, you should aim to respond to them as fast as possible. The faster you respond, the stronger the credibility you build for your non-profit.