We are pleased to announce our Q4 Socially Devoted results!
Socially Devoted is an industry standard that measures brands’ interactions with their fans. Since April of 2012 we have been using this new global benchmark for brands based on the number of questions responded to and the time taken to respond. When we launched this standard nine months ago, we were shocked to discover that 70% of questions on Facebook were not responded to. So we issued a challenge to brands – start talking to your fans!
We are thrilled that there has been a great increase in response rates throughout Q4. The UK has found itself ranked slightly higher than the rest of the world, responding to 45% of enquiries in Q2, and by Q3 had risen to 52%. The most recent results, in Q4, have shown that UK brands now respond on average to 55% of questions from their fans!
Visit our Socially Devoted page to see the rankings of worldwide brands and results for Twitter (NEW!!)
So, who were the best performers amongst those who have UK Facebook pages and who were the worst in our Q4 results?
The Most Socially Devoted Brands
These are the brands that understand the importance of social media two-way communication. They ensure that they have adequate teams to deal with their enquiries and post back as quickly as possible.
The Least Socially Devoted Brands
Not responding to your fans online is like slamming the phone down on them. We remain surprised by the number of brands that refuse to acknowledge their fans and potential customers on social media, not to mention brands that still choose to lock their Facebook walls and ignore their customers completely! Do you really want to buy food from a brand that won’t even talk to you?”
Keep an eye on our blog, we’ll be releasing more interesting statistics over the next few weeks!
Update: This blog post was previously called “The Best and Worst of UK Brands on Facebook” but we realized the headline didn´t give justice to the main message we wanted to send. This article evaluates the social customer service of brands on Facebook.
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Guy Stephens
Maie, thanks for the response. My comment about responding was that 'responding' is not necessarily an indicator of how social a company is. However, if we look at the response times and response rates of the companies that you list above, what is interesting to me is that the response times for the 'Top Socially Devoted' in many instances aren't that much better than the response times for the 'Least Socially Devoted' (discounting the outliers), while obviously the response rates do show a gulf between the two. One of the aspects many commentators put forward around social is its immediacy, and yet the response rates reflect the fact that immediacy isn't necessarily a driving factor to being social. Other surveys, like those done by Conversocial and I think the IAB did one a year or two back, set out the expectations of customers in terms of response times, with Twitter coming in within the hour, and Facebook from memory, within two hours. The ability for many companies to meet these expectations is proving challenging, but this does not necessarily negate their degree of 'social-ness'.
I'm wondering whether having visibility of the number of comments requiring a customer service response is an important consideration in all of this, as well?
Whichever way benchmarks and data are cut, I guess, we are in a period of change between so-called traditional methods of communication, and evolving ones like Facebook and Twitter, and over time the continuing integration of social channels into an overall communication ecosystem should see more and more companies not only add social channels into the mix, but also improve in the way they use and understand them.
Maie Crumpton
Hi Guy, we believe that response rate is a very important measurement in social media customer care. As a social media analytics company, these channels are naturally our focus and we can't account other channels such as telephone care lines. That said, we don’t believe it is possible to be ‘social’ while ignoring questions from your fans on public platforms. It’s a great thing that more and more companies are recognizing the importance of social customer care, because consumers have recognized it for quite some time already. It's time for companies to catch up! We'll have some updated Socially Devoted results in the next couple of weeks. We'll be interested to see if the amount of Socially Devoted companies continues to grow.
Guy Stephens
Not sure that 'responding' is an indication or measure of how social a company is. Nine months ago the number of companies using Facebook as a customer service channel was a lot less than it is now. I would expect in nine months time there will be a lot more than there is now. For companies like giffgaff, their community platform is their primary customer service platform. I'm not really sure what this benchmark really measures?