Too Much Social Media Means A Business Can Never Catch Up

Social Media Feedback is the Worst for Businesses

The sheer volume of online feedback means it’s impossible for companies to act on every complaint. Too much social media coverage is a real problem for businesses. Yelp, for example, has received over 148 million reviews since inception and has over 70 million unique desktop visitors per month! (read more interesting Yelp statistics). This sheer weight of traffic, comment and reviews mean brands are playing catch up at best. Although more likely outgunned and overmatched by sheer volume.

In 2016 only 30% of brands had a dedicated customer service handle on Twitter, and only 10% of those brands with customer service handles reply to more than 70% of their mentions. The average response rate was only 42%.

Most brands do invest in “social listening” programs, from monitoring software to teams of analysts who scan the feeds. However, they seem woefully inadequate in muffling negative feedback or amplifying positive feedback. Whilst these programs are becoming more sophisticated and efficient, they continue to be attacking the wrong problem. This is because they still are arriving at the business after some horrendous customer experience.

Read the full article from Adweek.

Too much data, from too few customers, without sufficient analysis – means a perpetual catch-up. If you want more reasons to confirm how social media is not the way to manage poor customer feedback read our recent blog. If you want to download an article on why we think Social Media is best not used as a feedback policy – visit this page and click on the product sheet.

The Solution – Point of Experience Customer Feedback

Better still – use a different tactic. Rather than trying to react to too much social media received after a customer experience, use a tool like Opiniator. This means you will now enable customer feedback at the point of experience and so pre-empt negative comments on social media. This way you have an opportunity to fix the issue and even contact the unhappy customer before they defect. Or worse, defect and complain online where the reach and retweet potential is limitless and lifelong.