Investing effort into creating and maintaining your Facebook business page. It's not enough, they say. Keeping things up to date, posting daily quality content, it's just the beginning of what your social media account it's supposed to be.

More and more customers are looking to engage on Facebook, chat with your business's representatives and last, but not least, find solutions to their offline product related problems. So, yes, Facebook turns out to be much more than a very popular social network, it's actually being used as a customer service platform. From idea to action many things can go wrong, that including creating a viral negative flow with the help of your Facebook wall.

Don't worry. In this fast changing environment nobody holds the key to customer satisfaction, no matter how much they would like to think otherwise. The best you can do is follow some decent guidelines and keep it simple, act human and personal on Facebook. The key to using this social media as a free CS platform relays here.

1. After setting up your own small Facebook community, the wisest thing to do is follow up on its activity. Don't assume that, even if nobody has posted anything, your online and even offline customers will not surely will at some point. That's the beauty of Facebook : it even attracts not regular social activists, clients who simply want to report an issue. Assume that nobody will make complaints on your Facebook page? Well, don't. The first bill will catch you off guard.

2. Once you get an account, be sure to provide immediate service to your wall customers. As the network is opened 24/7, your business hours don't matter anymore. While at the beginning of your social marketing plan, you may not have enough personnel to handle the Facebook activity. To avoid customer disappointment, most social media experts recommend setting official answering hours. So, yes, let your customers know when can they expect a reaction from your part.

3. Once you develop a larger Facebook community, you may find it harder to answer to all users' requests. This is usually the moment in which you need to use a social media expert, handling your prospects messages promptly. The customer service representatives should not get days off either, as there is one thing to respond to a query and another to provide quality information about your products. The easiest way for a small firm would be to instruct a CS representative into handling social media.

4. Let's say it's all going great, no messages left unsolved on your Facebook wall. There can come a time when your customer interaction should be diverted from the public eye ( this need will come up when you will need to receive/provide personal information : email address, phone #, details about orders, etc). Stepping away from your Facebook wall is a bit hard. Instead of rapidly using your individual account's chat, try directing the public to an email or red line where you can officially solve their problem.

And well, the rest is common knowledge and up to you for most parts: stay calm, polite, be real when talking to people ( loose the smug, robotic expressions) and everything will go well.

5. Don't want to handle CS on Facebook? Be honest, it's as simple as that : announce this fact in your account description and ask unsatisfied customers to report encountered issues to a certain email, through a chat or a red line. You can include your Facebook policies in the About or the Info sections of the business page.