Tuesday Tidbit: A Huge Social Media Yikes!

Friends, we need to talk. I was just perusing some of my favorite marketing article sites when I saw this headline:

Study: Retailers Are Ignoring More Than 80% Of Customers’ Social Media Requests

My reaction:

The horror!

According to Marketing Land:

Sprout Social finds most merchants fail to respond to consumer questions on Facebook and Twitter, a problem compounded during the holiday shopping season when the volume of requests increases.

Plain and simple, customers now expect to be able to interact with you on social media. Yes, I'm a professional in the digital realm, but I can tell you that Twitter is one of the first places I go to interact with a company when I have a question or comment. I've also used Facebook as recently as this past weekend to ask a question about a company's app that I downloaded.

Yet, here we are, finding out that companies aren't responding to 80% of social media questions and comments. Do you wonder how much lost business that resulted in? I don't doubt that it was quite a bit.

The moral of this story is plain and simple: If you have a presence on any social media platform, you HAVE to be vigilant about taking care of it and noticing if someone reaches out to you there. Expect that some customers or prospects will go there to contact you before even looking at the contact options on your website.

The article is full of even more nuggets of social media misbehavior, such as this one:

It’s not that these companies are inactive on social media. It’s just that they are mostly acting like a megaphone. During the third quarter of 2015, retailers sent three times more promotional messages than replies.

Yikes! Your audience deserves better. Need help with social media? Let's make a plan together.

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