Companies are still adopting social media. Some are adopting well while some aren’t … yet. I think some companies might take a while to adopt in this media. I’ve been spending more time on trying getting deals because I’ll be having my holidays soon and I want to book hotels and get great deals (I love social media for that) Some of the companies have twitter account, while some have facebook pages, twitter account, you name it.
So I thought it would be fun to tweet the companies. I sent out few tweets to two companies in the leisure industry to see if they will respond to my tweets or not.
Two of the companies are big companies.
The Companies
Company A
Following: 9,000+ Followers 9,000+ Tweets: 3541
Company B
Following 120+ Followers 3,000+ Tweets 591
Results
Company A
Replied me in 30 minutes. It was a question regarding payment system which they changed. So I thanked them for replying. After booking my holiday I sent them another tweet saying I booked my holidays and I am looking forward to it. They replied my tweet saying that they were looking forward serving me.
Company B
No replies. I wasn’t the only one that they didn’t reply though. Below is a screen shot from a customer.
They didn’t respond to that as well. Maybe they tried to replied in the email, I don’t know about that.
I’m not saying that I won’t be using company B though. I still use both their services despite Company B not replying. However here is a method that Company B can use to ensure that they respond quickly
How To Respond To Customers Quickly
1. Cotweet
Cotweet is one of my favorite tools to use. I use it on a daily basis but I still play around with other tools like hootsuite. I even wrote a blog post on 10 reasons why i personally recommend cotweet
Notice the “@” icon? What the @ icon means is someone is sending you a tweet. What companies can do is reply to all the “@” icons as soon as possible.
2. Twitter Search
I like to use twitter search, I use them a lot but not as frequent as cotweet. Usually I use twitter search whenever I am researching for something. If you’re a company and you want reply quickly you can use they key terms to:yourcompany so lets say you’re @dell so the keywords will be to:dell
Below is a screen shot of the search using twitter search with they words to:dell
This search results are tweets sent directly to @dell. Which means most probably they want a reply or is asking a question to dell. Its similar with the cotweet “@” icon like I mention above. All this tweets will have the “@” icon if they used cotweet.
However, there is something bad about this search. Whenever people don’t put @username in front, then there won’t be a @ icon on cotweet and it won’t come out on the to:dell search
For example tweets like this
So what do you do about this then? For this you can use different keywords to search on twitter. You can use @username -rt compared to to:dell or @username
Why do we use the -rt? The reason why we do that is we want to get rid of the retweets that people are retweeting from dell or from you company. So doing this will get you results of people talking about your company without the retweets.
Here is an example of a screen shot with the keywords @dell -rt
Notice there is no retweet inside the search? Of course you don’t have to keep on using twitter search, best thing about the search is you can subsribe to it via RSS and have them sent to you.
There are other tools that you can use, but I like to keep it simple and use these two tools.
Here are a few more for you to play around:
2. Twitterfall
By doing so you’ll get to reply to your customers as soon as possible and make them happy. People are coming into social media to complain as traditional customer services aren’t working well anymore. Why not hire someone to manage your twitter account for you? It will save you from this type of things happening to your company.
So what about you guys? Have you had good or bad experience with companies on twitter. Share them below 🙂
photo credits: by Bitpicture
Hi Aaron, Another insightful post…you truly hit the nail on the head! All businesses need to read this, even niche social media communities. I think the misnomer is if you have a large following and follow few, like your example Company B, you're important and more credible. However as social media grows exponentially, customer service will be a key element for businesses. They'll need to be more transparent and customer-focused! Again, kudos to you for an eye-opening and insightful post! Alway look forward to reading your blog…awesome! ;D
Hi Aaron,
This is my first visit to your site. Nice!
Just to say I think that businesses feel some kind of social pressure that they *must* have a Twitter account but quickly lose interest when they dont “get it”.
I think this can be more damaging to a company's brand than not having a presence on Twitter or any other social networking platform.
I think the problem is that, once they lose interest, they dont check in. For some people its just one too many things to have to log into, especially for newbies that havent discovered something like TweetDeck or Meebo or Yoono.
I would recommend @mentionnotifier to get all mentions sent to your email account. I wish that Twitter would incorporate a similar service since I think there would be a lot less abandoned accounts.
Hi!
Thank you for visiting my site 🙂
Yes i agree that businesses feel pressured to jump on the social media bandwagon. Perhaps that is why you lose interest like you mention.
Thank you for the recommendations on @mentionnotifier, their twitter account looks inactive though .
Thank you so much for Visiting and leaving a comment Kathy,
I appreciate it a lot. Indeed social media plays a key role for business success but not many companies are doing much on it. They mistake is thinking social media will “work for them” while actually social media is about “helping the customers and building a long term relationship” that will of course benefit them 🙂