Social Media Strategies: From Xbox One to Performing Arts Organizations

What’s Your Response Time?

Xbox has many back-up support accounts on Twitter that help them organize and effectively manage their customers and concerns. By distinguishing between different companies, developers’ programmes, Xbox Live and so on, Xbox has helped themselves by making it easier for customers to reach out to the correct team, which in turn helps them deal with support issues more effectively.

While I’m not necessarily suggesting that your performing arts organization needs multiple social media accounts, it might be something worth considering if you run a substantially sized summer festival or have two organizations working in tandem. More importantly though is the amount of time in which it takes your organization to get in touch with your patrons if they have voiced a concern. Xbox’s time of 2:42 minutes is impressive…and not necessary for most performing arts organizations. Instead, try to respond within 24 hours and be clear if you only have online support during specific times and days of the week. This information will help your patrons have more clearly defined expectations of when they should hear back from you.

How Do You Deal With Negative Feedback?

Xbox does a terrific job of handling the positives and negatives. Tweeps won’t always be reaching out with kudos and pats of the back and your online social media team needs to be ready to handle the negative feedback effectively and efficiently. According to the Support Manager for the @XboxSupport Twitter Account, James Degnan:

“If a community member is being negative, we’ll do everything we can to gain understanding and turn their experiences around. We’ll always try to alleviate a root cause of any concerns. We do our best to guide the conversation, and stay on Xbox related support topics.”

This is really great advice! Look at the negative feedback as an opportunity to be honest, acknowledge any mistakes that you might have made, and (most importantly) how you are remedying the issue. Get to the root of the problem quickly and do your best to turn that negative into a positive!

How Do You Show Your Appreciation?

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Of course, we want to deal with any negative feedback quickly to keep our patrons happy and help resolve any issues that they may have…but it’s almost as equally important to show our appreciation for the positive feedback. Your loyal and devoted Tweeps are great advocates for your organization – show them some love!

Upon receiving some very positive tweet mentions prior to their product launch, Xbox One showed a few of their loyal Tweeps some love by creating special images made for them which included a personal reply (seen below). Not only are these images very cool, but they received a high amount of retweets and favorites. Now that’s how you thank and engage your followers!

Are you still curious about ways in which to show your appreciation to your most loyal online supporters? Check out our article about revolutionizing your theatre support program.

Key Takeaways:

• Quick responses are the norm (and expected) on social media. Make it clear if your organization is only online Monday through Friday or only responds during certain hours of the day. (My suggestion is to try for a response within 24 hours.)
• Deal with negative comments efficiently. Get to the root of the problem fast by trying your best to understand the key issue and help your customer fix it.
• Make backlash an opportunity. Try to view negative backlash as an opportunity to be honest, acknowledge your mistakes and address how the issue is being dealt with.
• Show your most devoted fans that you care. Be sure to thank your best content sharing Tweeps regularly!

Does your performing arts organization employ any of these online social media strategies? How have they helped (or hindered) your online presence so far?