Social media has become a critical channel for customer engagement. Customers expect quick and personalized responses on the platforms they use daily — whether it’s Facebook, X or other channels. In fact, according to a survey Genesys conducted in 2024, 52% of consumer respondents surveyed who said they’ve shared a negative experience on social media reported doing so to prompt direct attention from the brand in order to resolve a problem.

But without the right tools, managing social media interactions can feel disconnected from traditional customer service channels. And that can create a disjointed — and frustrating — customer experience (CX).

Genesys Cloud Social brings public social media care into the Genesys Cloud™ platform. By integrating social media listening and engagement directly into the contact center, brands can provide a truly omnichannel customer experience by breaking down silos between marketing and customer support to create a seamless approach to social media interactions.

Why Social Media Belongs in Your Customer Experience Strategy

Social media customer care is often managed separately from the contact center, resulting in fragmented conversations, delayed responses and unsatisfactory customer experiences. While contact centers excel at handling customer interactions, often marketing team members will focus on managing the public narrative on social platforms.

Their aim might be to promote the brand. But when marketing leads these interactions, it can create information silos.

Often, customers will then receive assistance without the full context, forcing them to repeat their issues or endure transfers. They might even need to resubmit their issues on the company’s website through a form.

However, managing these exchanges within your contact center can help to resolve the problems. Sometimes it results in faster response times and a first-contact resolution. 

There’s often no need to escalate to your customer support teams. All of this can lead to a significantly better overall customer experience.

Here’s why integrating social media channels into your contact center CX strategy is crucial.

  • Proactive Engagement: Social listening allows brands to identify and engage with customers before they escalate issues through traditional support channels, reducing inbound contact volume and handling costs by directing traffic away from more cost-prohibitive engagements like voice.
  • Unified Agent Experience: With artificial intelligence (AI)-driven sentiment analysis, customer posts are classified as positive, negative or neutral. This helps customer service teams prioritize responses efficiently. Agents can then engage using the same routing and queueing system as other interactions, ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints.
  • Holistic Customer View: By capturing social data from keywords, accounts or hashtags, brands gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This leads to more personalized support and effective interactions. And it does so while avoiding the frustrating aspect of having customers repeat themselves.


“Not every social post requires a response,
but some demand immediate attention.”

Best Practices for Social Media Care in the Contact Center

It’s easy to list the pitfalls of improperly managed social media — from missing valid customer enquiries to damaging a brand’s reputation. Instead of focusing on those, let’s look at some best practices for improving the overall customer experience and enhancing efficiency.

1. Leverage AI and Automation Features for Smarter Engagements

AI-powered tools like Genesys Cloud Agent Copilot can support agents with real-time insights and suggested responses. This helps to ensure faster and more relevant replies to social media posts. 

Automated escalation rules can also route critical posts to the right teams and AI-powered predictive routing can then move these conversations to the right available agent. This can reduce transfers and boost first-contact resolution rates.

2. Prioritize Posts with Sentiment Analysis

Not every social post requires a response, but some demand immediate attention. AI-driven sentiment analysis helps identify urgent customer concerns, allowing businesses to respond proactively before frustrations escalate.

3. Give Agents a Single View into Interactions

Agents shouldn’t have to juggle multiple platforms to manage customer interactions. With Genesys Cloud Social, teams can respond to social media inquiries from a single interface used for voice, SMS, WhatsApp and email. This eliminates inefficiencies and allows agents to provide a more consistent and personalized experience.

4. Establish Clear Escalation Rules

Defining social escalation rules helps to ensure that the right posts reach the right people. For example, brands can set conditions such as:

  • A post must contain specific keywords to be escalated.
  • A post must include one keyword but exclude another to qualify for agent review.

This automated approach allows high-priority posts to be addressed quickly while filtering out noise. In addition, brands can customize these rules based on the platform. For example, they might prefer to have less strict escalation rules for posts on a specific platform, automatically routing more of those to agents as it might be perceived as more strategically important to the brand.

5. Be Aware of and Manage Public and Direct Message Social Interactions

A crucial aspect of engaging in public social interactions is recognizing that you’re operating in a highly visible environment. Every response can influence not only the individual customer but also the broader audience observing the exchange. 

While transparency is important, not every detail of a customer issue should be shared publicly. Sensitive information, account details or complex troubleshooting steps are better handled privately, ensuring both confidentiality and efficiency.

At the same time, responsiveness in the public space signals attentiveness and care. A short, timely reply, such as thanking the customer for reaching out or acknowledging their concern, demonstrates that the brand is listening. 

From there, the agent can tactfully indicate that further assistance will be provided via direct message (DM). This approach balances visibility with discretion: the public sees that the brand is proactive, while the customer receives personalized support in a secure setting.

By managing this transition thoughtfully, businesses can avoid long, unproductive public exchanges and minimize reputational risk. Moreover, they create opportunities to build trust and loyalty through one-on-one engagement. 

Ultimately, knowing when to stay public and when to move private is key to delivering respectful, professional, and effective social customer care.

6. Use Social Data to Continuously Improve CX

Social media is more than just a channel for customer engagement; it’s also a rich source of data that can fuel continuous improvement. By analyzing customer conversations, businesses gain real-time visibility into the issues customers care about most. 

These insights can highlight recurring pain points, uncover emerging trends and even reveal opportunities to refine products or services before small issues escalate into larger concerns.

Equally important is the collaboration between marketing and customer support teams. Social conversations often provide context that can shape communication strategies, campaign messaging and customer education initiatives. 

When support agents flag recurring questions or frustrations, marketing teams can proactively adjust FAQs, create content that addresses concerns or craft messaging that sets clearer expectations.

In addition, social data enables smarter automation. By monitoring performance metrics and applying filters such as topic, language, content type, platform and geography, businesses can establish rules that automatically escalate high-priority or sensitive posts to available agents. 

This reduces response time and ensures customers receive timely, human support where it matters most. Over time, these feedback loops can help brands not only resolve issues faster but also anticipate needs and build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their audiences.

Scaling Social Media Support Without Overwhelming Agents

One of the biggest challenges of social media customer care is scaling without overloading your team. Genesys Cloud Social makes this possible by:

  1. Providing agents with AI-assisted recommendations for faster, more accurate responses.
  2. Streamlining workflows so that social media interactions follow the same routing and queueing rules as channels including voice, email and others.
  3. Reducing the number of websites agents have to work from through unified interfaces. Whether it’s Genesys Cloud, Salesforce or other systems via an embedded framework, agents can help customers without having to hop between different platforms.

That also means agents can easily switch between publicly responding on a social media site and then immediately following it up with a private DM to the same user. They have the ability to change channels (like switch to voice or email) and still keep the conversation linked to the same customer profile and interaction.

In addition to managing interactions, agents should also have access to the information they need to learn about the customer and their recent interactions with your brand.

With native AI agent solutions and ease-of-use focused design, organizations can efficiently scale social engagement while reducing agent burnout — allowing for a high-quality customer experience across all digital touchpoints.

Go Beyond Just Monitoring Social Media Platforms

In today’s digital-first world, customers expect fluid and responsive support—no matter where they reach out. Whether the conversation begins on X, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, customers don’t distinguish between social and traditional channels; they expect the same level of care and consistency everywhere. By integrating social media care into your customer support software, your brand can seamlessly bridge these interactions and provide proactive, personalized engagement that strengthens relationships.

The stakes are high: more than half (53%) of consumers surveyed said they will abandon a favorite brand after experiencing as few as two poor interactions. This shows that customer loyalty is fragile and directly tied to how brands manage each engagement. A single missed or mishandled social inquiry can damage trust, while a quick, thoughtful response can create advocates who share their positive experiences publicly.

Integration also empowers agents. Instead of toggling between platforms and tools, they can access all customer history, context, and interactions from one place. This saves valuable time, reduces frustration, and enables agents to focus on delivering empathetic, human-centered support. The result is a win-win: Customers feel heard and valued, and organizations build loyalty, increase satisfaction, and protect long-term brand reputation.

With Genesys Cloud Social, businesses don’t just monitor social conversations — they turn them into meaningful, connected customer experiences. By unifying digital interactions into a single, AI-powered platform, companies can optimize efficiency, improve customer engagement and future-proof their social media strategy.

Ready to elevate your social media customer care? Contact us for a demo of Genesys Cloud Social.