When it comes to communicating with your clients, sending them a message on the right platform can hugely impact their reply time.

Many of us naturally send people an email when it is business related because that is seen as ‘the norm’, but what we don’t think to take into consideration is our clients most valued platform.

Like many of us know, the amount of sales emails and general spam that comes into our inbox is unimaginable, we are all guilty for just deleting the lot or completely ignoring it and letting them build up.

So, if you needed a reply from a client urgently and your email gets lost in the pile, the likelihood is that they aren’t going to see that email in time, or better yet, never even read it.

So this is where having social media as an alternative can be a life saver.

With more and more people and businesses joining the digital world, social media is now the place to be. With billions of people having an account on at least one network, checking your page is now a second nature and the average time a person spends on social media a day is 3 hours, whereas most people don’t even check their emails daily.

Sending someone a message on social media almost guarantees they will receive it and take action, even if it means going into their emails to see your original request. Instant notifications on social media make it nearly impossible to miss any activity that happens on your account, so if you are dealing with a business that has Instagram, sending them a DM might be your better option.

But don’t get me wrong, sending a client a quick email is always a good idea, even if they don’t see it straight away.

Sending an email is a lot more secure than a social media account, this means that you can relay important information without the worry of your information being hacked or received by the wrong person and have an information trail to look back on. Whereas, social media accounts have a bad reputation on being hacked, so when it comes to sending over confidential information, always use the most secure network you can.

Sending someone and email then following up with a message on social media if you haven’t got a reply could be the way forward.

But the main thing to remember when deciding on what platform to use is to take your client into consideration, whether that be their age, industry, or personality. For example, people in the beauty industry rely heavily on social media when it comes to bringing in clients, so they would constantly be replying to messages, whereas people in the legal industry would be more likely to check emails and have a more formal approach when it comes to dealing with clients.

So make sure you have a chat with all your clients about what they would prefer, because we always have to put our clients needs first.