Do You Pay Enough Attention To Your Customers On Social Media?

In this day and age, consumers want brands to use social media as a two way communication tool, but most businesses are not fulfilling those requests. A study carried out by an SMM (Social Media management) software provider found that on average, businesses send out 23 promotional messages for every one customer response.

When it comes to customers interacting with businesses, social media is now the leading method. Statistics gained demonstrated that 34.5% of consumers turn to social media when requiring assistance, 16% call and only 5% visit a store in person. Customers are not asking for rocket science responses, they simply want to have a response to their problem when reaching out.

The study also showed that within three months of a new year, businesses on average were receiving 960 messages that required responding too, which increased from 18% just a year previously. So it’s a shame that 90% of those messages from customers are ignored by businesses. And very often, the messages that are replied too aren’t replied too very quickly. It takes on average 10 hours for a brand to reply to a social media message. Most customers expect a response within 4 hours of sending a message to the businesses social media site.

From all the evidence it appears that customers are requiring a greater social interaction, but businesses are not moving fast enough. This lack of relationship between the customer and business is impacting on customer loyalty, retention and publicity.

The study also shows us that 30% of customers will change to a competitor if they consistently get ignored by their social media messages, and 65% of customer loyalty will increase when they’re query has been answered and resolved.

By making sure customers are satisfied with their service experience, they can be converted into highly vocal brand advocates. More evidence to justify this is that the study has shown on average, 75% of people claim they are more likely to post something positive about a business that has interacted with them on social media, and 43% of users are more likely to actually make a purchase. It is quite clear that from this study, businesses need to better their strategy and thinking when it comes to optimizing the use of customer interaction and relationship through social media. Businesses should first start to consider outlining a plan for tackling the onslaught, and ensuring to speak with a unified voice that still empowers each agent to show some personality.

The study that has been referred to in this article was carried out by ‘Sprout Social’. It was based on data from 247,000 public social profiles (93,000 Facebook; 114,000 Twitter; 40,000 Instagram) of continually active accounts between the first quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. During that time 2.9 billion messages were analysed for the research.