According to some recent marketing research, chatbots just may enhance, not only your customer service capabilities, but just may drive more social media traffic for you within certain demographics. While the research done by the technology company Retale, and others, had some interesting findings, there are still many things to be concerned with before you decide you may want to integrate chatbots into your social media marketing.
- Retale found that the twenty and thirty something generations were the most responsive to chatbots and have generally embraced them as a way to communicate and be educated about a particular business or brand. The research showed that nearly 60% of that particular demographic have used chatbots and that more than half of those who hadn’t used them stated that they would be interested in trying them out.
- When this demographic was asked if they would purchase a product or service after having a chatbox experience with the brand, over 70% said that they would or that they have already. This is a technologically connected group as further research found that over 80% of them leave their cell phones on all the time and nearly that percentage check their phones before even getting out of bed in the morning.
- Still, it is always best to run some A/B tests across your demographic board especially if you have a mix of generations for potential customers. The older generations are slower to adopt the new technology but they eventually adjust to it. Just like your social media marketing, you need to be where your potential customers are. Chatbots are widely used by brands that rely heavily on conversation and customer service contact to drive traffic and make conversions.
- In fact, the four leading messaging apps have now surpassed the monthly user totals of the major social media networks. Just Facebook Messenger alone has over one billion users chatting happily away every month. The popularity of chatting and chatbots doesn’t seem like it is going to fade anytime soon.
- While around 80% of those surveyed found their chatbox experience helpful, many complained that they were not as accurate as they might be with regard to disseminating information that users and customers were seeking about a product or service. They also stated that they hoped that the chatbots would sound more like a human was talking but technology will improve with regard to that matter.
- In some related research, it was discovered that while many businesses want to integrate chatbots and artificial intelligence into their social media marketing, many worried that the technology was too sophisticated and that training employees would be difficult and time consuming.
In the end, the conclusion of all of this recent research seems to be that chatbots will be making a proverbial splash for the foreseeable future and that your online marketing needs to take advantage of it. Anything that increases your customers ability to know your products, and to have a great time doing it, must be put into play as soon as you can.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2024