By Bryan Reynolds, Senior Manager, Post Sales, TBI and Channel Partners Advisory Board member  

More than five years of your life will be spent on social media. That’s almost two years longer than you’ll spend eating.

According to an article published by Adweek, the average person will spend that time – five years and four months, to be exact – on platforms including (but not limited to) Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter.

This makes perfect sense if you think about it: Social media has been around long enough to become ingrained in our everyday lives. It’s the first thing many of us check when we wake up, and the last thing we look at before falling asleep. It’s the main source of news for many people and an outlet to share their successes and shout their protests. Being a millennial in the channel, which straddles tech and interpersonal relationships, means I consider myself a social connoisseur of sorts. I’m certainly guilty of posting a selfie or two. It’s not only entertaining, it’s a way to involve others in every detail of our lives.

While five years is very significant, television still reigns as the ultimate “time suck,” taking up about seven years of our lives, and the current prices for advertising on that medium reflect that. The cost for a 30-second Super Bowl ad in 2018 was around $5 million (that’s $166,000 per second). However, with more “cord cutters” coming over the horizon, I would venture to say that advertising costs for television will go down, and since subscription streaming services just don’t carry the same advertising weight as a typical cable package does, companies, including the ones we work for and resell, will have to get creative in their advertising tactics. If you take into consideration research that suggests today’s typical teenager spends upward of nine hours per day (yes, you read that right) on social media, checking it more than 100 times a day, companies can’t ignore the fact that television advertisements are now the new classifieds. The higher ROI lies in social media.

Like it or not, these snap-crazed teenagers are the consumers of today’s and tomorrow’s goods and services, and you can bet anything they “consume” will be shared all over social media along with their opinions. If they have a bad experience, every one of their followers will know about it. This creates a PR wildfire that’s bad for businesses, highly difficult to control and capable of severely damaging a company’s reputation.

So, how does this relate to a channel partner?

Prediction: Social-media monitoring will soon become as necessary as bandwidth in every business practice.

The risks associated with social media breed opportunity for channel partners to sell solutions that control them. As stated, bad experiences will be on social media for the world to see and will be undeletable. However, the opportunity lies in …

… showing the world how the business responds to that bad experience. A great example is the Wendy’s Twitter account. This is an example of a company engaging with customers having a bad experience and addressing it as it happens. Not to mention they are taking every chance to fire back at the “haters” (seriously, check it out, it’s hilarious).

Wendy’s is also keeping an eye on its competition and going head-to-head on social media, with fast-food outlets taking jabs at one another — entertainment at its best, and because of this, Wendy’s feed has received mainstream media recognition of being one of the more amusing Twitter accounts. It has more than 2.4 million followers.

To be like Wendy’s, you don’t have to sit and watch your, or your customers’, feeds all day. There are free and low-cost social media monitoring tools available to help, and providers like 8×8, Vonage, and RingCentral (among others) have applications and partnerships that make it easy to keep a finger on the social media “pulse” and drive revenue. Just imagine: Someone has a bad experience and vents on social media. Within seconds, using a monitoring tool, you or the customer receives an alert and can respond and mitigate the damage before the wildfire spreads.

Can you see the payoff here?

Not only does this help secure future business from that customer, but it also gains the respect and attention of the masses. Not to mention response time is huge when measuring customer service scores, and this customer-service-centric use of social media is an efficient medium of resolving issues publicly for customers. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, we have great customer service,” but why not prove it?

As we further grow into a society that is driven by online interactions, keeping yourself and your customers ahead of the curve is going to be the fundamental marker of a complete solution provider. Social media is here and is growing at an extraordinary rate. It will be vital to invest in customer service and account-retention teams by providing them the tools that enable them to interact with customers and triage customer interactions so that revenue can be retained and grown. If the only focus is on growing call center/phone skills for customer service, you’ll miss the need of your customers.

Ask your UCaaS vendors about their social media monitoring plans. More and more, telecom and cloud companies are aligning with (or acquiring) companies that offer these services because they realize the importance of this, not to mention the ROI is very high. If you don’t like the answer, check with your master agent.

If you are one of the naysayers when it comes to social media, claiming that it’s unnecessary and gets in the way, you need to climb on board fast because the bus is leaving and so are your customers. When used correctly, social media is a powerful engine for commerce and a very unrestricted application of good customer service. Talk with your service providers and see what they can offer you and your customers. When you tweet, pin or post, the ripples it creates go farther than you think. Help your customers realize that (and turn it into revenue).

Side note: You may want to go work on your selfie pose; you’ve only got about five years to perfect it …