Socialbakers’ new study busts social devotion myths.
Socialbakers have recently released a new study of social media customer service practices. The study highlights a major opportunity for companies to improve client satisfaction through better social media outreach.
According to the study, socially devoted companies can serve as role models, demonstrating how businesses worldwide can drive customer engagement by adopting more reactive and open social media strategies. Socialbakers developed the Socially Devoted standard as a benchmark companies can use to see where they rank in terms of social media performance as compared to competitors and to gauge their progress as they take steps to improve their Socially Devoted rank.
Unfortunately, for many companies dealing with customers online, the road to socially devoted is still a long one. An incredible percentage of questions from Facebook fans are ignored by companies – about 70%, according to the study – which defeats the purpose of having a corporate presence on Facebook, or on any social networks for that matter. Socialbakers revealed that 25% of global companies go as far as closing their wall on Facebook to prevent fans from asking questions at all.
The telecommunications and mobile industry are by far the most Socially Devoted niches.
“Socially Devoted companies communicate openly, actively respond to fans and make sure customers receive a quick answer to feedback or questions. Socially Devoted companies set a new global standard that other businesses can adopt to improve their social media marketing strategy,” explained Socialbakers CEO Jan Rezab.
Other findings of the Socialbakers research study revealed that:
- On average, companies respond to only 30% of social media fans’ feedback.
- Local companies tend to have higher social media response rates than their global counterparts, with 40 percent responding to customer queries.
- More than 25% of global companies have a closed wall on Facebook, meaning users can’t post questions or feedback.
- The average response time for companies on social media is 26 hours.
- U.S.-based companies tend to perform less effectively on social media channels than their regional peers.
The study also defined the top ten socially devoted brands on Facebook: Personal Argentina, Claro, Acer Indonesia, LBC Express Inc., Comunidad Movistar Argentina, Volaris, Safaricom Kenya Official Page, KLM, Vodafone Nederland and Claro El Salvador.
Responsive social media communications can be a great tool to upsell products and services and build positive customer relationships. But it’s also important to note that a lack of responsiveness can harm customer relationships, which makes a high Socially Devoted commitment even more crucial as consumers gravitate toward social media platforms as their primary communication mode.
Socialbakers offers a comprehensive social analytics platform that delivers actionable insights marketers and customer service professionals can use to measure success and drive ROI across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn.