Recent social media platform updates, such as Messenger and chatbots, present both opportunities and threats to a brand’s social care strategy. While enabling AI-driven chatbots can be cost-effective, and provide 24/7 management of high-volume customer inquiries, they can also be damaging to the brand — from creating poor, artificial customer experiences to harming your brand reputation and even creating cyber security problems. That’s why a strategy that implements both bots and human interactions is the best practice for social care.

It was between 2007 and 2008 when companies started to look at social media, not just as “something young people do,” but as a business channel; an opportunity for a new type of interaction with customers and an innovative way to generate leads. At this point, Facebook built Facebook Pages, which allowed any entity to create a Business Page on Facebook. In addition, Facebook expanded its advertising capabilities and continued work on developing its Mobile App.

Social Media Automation, however, is a fairly new concept, primarily because of how new Social Media is in general as a business tool. Recent feature updates such as Messenger and the deployment of Bots present both opportunities and threats, not only to a customer’s experience but also to a brand’s reputation.