Hot on the heels of our Social Insights events in Istanbul and Dubai last week, we look at both Turkey and the UAE's social customer care for Q3 2014, and find one serious issue.

Brands in both countries are doing well at answering fan questions both on the average Question Response Rate and the average Question Response Time. But it’s not all good news: in Turkey, more than 60% of brands we monitor have closed Timelines!

It looks like both Turkish and Emirati brands are following overall global trends for this quarter. There are some brands that do customer care on social and do it well. However, a great deal of brands in this region are not doing customer care on social at all.

Providing customer care on social pays off for brands. At Engage NYC, Orange Telecom shared that they saved up to $5 million each year on deflected calls worldwide, when service was handled on social instead.

Response Rates & Response Times

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The amount of closed Timelines in Turkey is slightly shocking, especially since the country does not lag behind the global standard for other Socially Devoted benchmarks: the Question Response Rate (QRR) is 68% (the global average is 70%) and the average Question Response Time (QRT) of about 30 hours is actually 3 hours faster than the global average – not that 30 hours is a good response time, of course!

In the Emirates, brands answer a higher percentage of questions they’re asked, with an excellent QRR of 74%. But they also take slightly longer to answer than in Turkey.

Often brands have a problem optimizing their efforts to answer the most questions in a reasonable timeframe. Using an enterprise publishing solution like Socialbakers Builder helps brands achieve this goal because it saves them time and human capital by aggregating user posts from Facebook® and Twitter, making scheduled publishing easy.

Sixty Percent of Brands Have Closed Timelines on Facebook in Turkey

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Our data shows that, globally, 18% of brands have closed Facebook Timelines. That’s not a good sign – closed Timelines can mean that:

• The brand does not want to (or does not appear to) listen to their clients/audience
• The brand is hiding something (like bad reviews, which you can counteract with good customer service for all to see if the Timeline is open)
• The amount of redundant questions posed to a brand can go up, whereas on an open Timeline a user may already get their answer because someone else asked the question and got a response

If the global average is bad, Turkey’s closed Timeline epidemic is inexcusable. Turkish brands are way behind – over 60% have closed Timelines.

Having a closed Timeline on Facebook means that a brand cannot be Socially Devoted, as measured by Socialbakers. Although some brands do customer care on social through an app integrated into their Page and close the Timeline to make the posts invisible to other users, the same problems apply. Whatever the reason, a having a closed Timeline can hurt a brand’s ability to provide customer care.

But more and more brands are becoming Socially Devoted in Turkey: customer care on social has seen an 8% adoption rate by companies in the country, compared to just 4.5% of brands globally in Q3. This number should grow even faster when brands that already strive to provide great social customer care open their Facebook Timelines.

Check out all the Socially Devoted results, including benchmarks for Socially Devoted brands for both QRT and QRR and compare your own brand Page’s results to them.

Turkish Airlines: At the Forefront of Change

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Globally, our data suggests 30% of airlines have closed Timelines. Despite this, and the fact that Turkey has such a high rate of closed Timelines, Socialbakers client Turkish Airlines absolutely excels at being Socially Devoted. In Q3 they had an average QRR of 82% and a QRT of just under 2 hours (the Facebook average for Q3 was 33 hours).

With numbers like these, Turkish Airlines is way ahead of the curve, and keeps flying farther past their regional and industrial competitors.

To learn more about how you can create great social customer care results and make your brand Socially Devoted, find out more about Socialbakers Analytics and Builder.

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