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Social media customers have increasingly demanding expectations. About 95 percent of millennials expect brands to have a Facebook presence, and over 80 percent expect brands to be on Twitter, HubSpot research found.

According to Edison Research, 42 percent of customers expect service requests made through social media to be handled within 60 minutes, while 32 percent expect a response within 30 minutes. About 57 percent expect the same response on evenings and during weekends as during normal business hours.

If you’re a small business with a small staff, meeting these expectations may seem daunting. Here are some strategies for providing effective 24/7 social media customer service.

Establish Your Customer Service Social Strategy

Twitter provides some customer service guidelines for their platform that serve as a useful template for social media in general. Twitter recommendsÂ aligning your social service strategy with your marketing, branding and overall service goals. How do you want your customer service to position your company? How will your social media service contribute to this? Sum up your strategy in a vision statement using two to five keywords describing what you will deliver customers, how this will make you stand out from the competition and what you will do to put these ideals into action.

Twitter suggests organizing your strategy around three stages of customer service. The most reactive stage involves responding when a customer posts a message directly requesting a service representative. The next stage involves posting resolutions to issues affecting groups of customers, such as announcing an update or a solution to a software glitch. The most proactive stage anticipates customer service concerns before they come up by posting relevant content, such as how-to tips. Most companies begin with a priority of reacting to individual service issues and gradually develop the capability of becoming more proactive. But if you’re already doing significant social media marketing, you may be able to adopt a more proactive strategy by incorporating customer service tips into your content feeds.

Set Performance Goals

To put your social customer service strategy into effect, the next step is setting measurable performance goals. This will enable you to create benchmarks for evaluating your progress and measuring whether or not your strategy is successful.

You can set customer service goals in a number of specific areas. Internally, you can measure your operational performance, using metrics such as number of incidents, average response time and percentage of tickets resolved through social media without having to be referred to the phone or another media channel. You can also measure external, customer-centered goals “” such as what percentage of customers are satisfied with your response, average level of satisfaction and likelihood of referring you to a friend or family member.

Create Your Support Infrastructure

The next step toward putting your strategy into practice is creating an infrastructure for your support team. This begins with setting up your social media support accounts, which can use dedicated customer service usernames or brand usernames. You will also need to pick the members of your support team. These should be personnel with a combination of strong interpersonal, writing and technical skills. You can deploy members of your own organization or outsource to a professional help center.

If you’re using members of your own organization, you may need to set up your communications infrastructure. For instance, you may opt to go with a virtual PBX provider who lets you forward texts and customer service calls from your business number to the smartphone numbers of your team members. This lets you employ remote representatives using their own iPhone or other mobile device instead of relying on in-office equipment.

Planning your workflow is another important part of creating your infrastructure. For instance, you might decide that service requests about billing information should get routed to different personnel than technical support requests.

Collect Feedback

Once you implement your customer service strategy, you should startÂ collecting feedback so you can evaluate your results and make improvements. One simple way to do this is to send a survey to customers who have just been helped to evaluate your performance. Use their input, whether positive or negative, as valuable information to improve your service.

The University of Southern California defines consumer psychology as the study of how consumers are influenced by their environment about how they think, feel, reason and select between different brands, products and retailers. It’s humbling to think that emotions are the driving force behind sales instead of logic, but study after study shows spending happens more in a state of euphoria.

But it can be difficult to find the emotional heartstrings to pull when you’re selling a product that might be considered boring. Here are four ways to get your customer more emotionally involved in your business, not by tricking them or bribing them, but communicating with them in a more emotional way.

Understand the Customer’s Belief System

In order to tap into their emotions, you must first learn what they care about. This may sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. Business owners are often so immersed in the day to day workings of the business that it’s hard for them to interact with customers on a daily basis and assess their changing needs.

Do your due diligence and take any and all opportunities to get feedback from competitors, colleagues and most importantly customers. An email blast offering customers a percentage off their next purchase in exchange for feedback about their wants costs you nothing, might spark some repeat sales, while also giving you a wealth knowledge about what is important to your customer and how you can give them exactly what they want.

Make It Tangible

Real-world application of a product takes it from something the consumer is evaluating logically and turns it into something the consumer is imagining using. AppleRubber.com has a great example of this on their blog, where they take an obscure concept like additive manufacturing and apply it to industries that customers can get excited about, such as sportswear, aerospace and healthcare. Manufacturing isn’t all that exciting, but when it applies to specific things that consumers encounter every day, it suddenly becomes relevant to them.

Make it Helpful

Consumers have a heart. And they want to use it. Partnering with non-profit organizations is one of the smartest things a business owner can do. You get increased exposure, so does the organization, and you can work together to benefit a worthy cause.

But be careful. Your customer’s intuition is surprisingly sophisticated. If you partner with a cause just because it is popular or convenient, you’re much less likely to get the results you’re looking for.

Talk to your employees, colleagues, and review your mission statement to help you choose an organization that shares your mission and needs your help. Don’t look for press or endless gratitude. Make your goal to help and nothing more, and your customers will feel grateful and loyal to your brand.

Make it Social

Everyone is passionate about their friends and family. So that’s exactly where you want consumers to hear about your product, from their friends and family. Testimonials about your product, no matter how mundane that product is, builds trust in the consumer like no other form of advertising can.

So dig into social media, encourage customers to engage with you and reward them when they do. Also incorporating testimonials on your website, especially video testimonials, can go a long way in developing a relationship with your customer that’s about more than sales.

4 Steps to Meet 24/7 Customer Service Expectations on Social Media