Do prospects message your business on Instagram or Facebook? Wondering how to answer inbound inquiries quickly—even outside of business hours? In this article, you’ll discover how to use automatic responses to connect instantly with your future customers on Instagram and Facebook.Does your team take several hours to respond to customer inquiries from social media channels? Or worse, do you have dozens of days-old messages still flagged for follow-up?When customers take the time to message your business on Facebook or Instagram, it’s easy to assume that they’ll wait for your response before taking action. But that’s not a realistic approach, especially when the average customer has high expectations and tons of other options to consider.
Nearly 80% of customers expect to receive a response to social media inquiries within 24 hours. That timeframe might sound relatively reasonable until you consider that nearly 40% of customers expect a response within an hour.If your team doesn’t consistently respond within 60 minutes, you certainly aren’t alone. Across social media platforms, businesses take an average of 5 hours to respond to customer inquiries.
There are plenty of reasons your team’s average response time could be 5 hours or more. Maybe you only have time to check your Meta Business Suite inbox a couple of times per day. Perhaps your team is only online during standard business hours.But either way, it’s important to know that your approach may not meet customer expectations. As a result, you could end up with unhappy customers, decreased loyalty, or missed sales opportunities.
Being responsive to Facebook and Instagram inquiries can be a great way to establish credibility and build trust among prospects. If your team tends to reply to Facebook messages quickly, your page automatically displays a Very Responsive badge alongside a Send Message call to action (CTA), which may encourage more prospects to message you.
