Fed up With Being Ignored, People Are Ready to Bite Back

For years, Sprout Social has been touting the benefits of social media engagement for brands’ bottom lines. Unfortunately, most businesses continue to use social as a promotional mechanism instead of a two-way communication channel. Case in point: Brands send 23 messages for every 1 consumer response.

So we decided to take a deeper dive into the data to understand the disconnect between customer expectations and brand realities and what role that gap plays in loyalty, customer retention and publicity.

For this report, Sprout surveyed more than a thousand Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users on their expectations for reaching out to brands on social. We then compared their responses with data from the social profiles of thousands upon thousands of brands across 15 industries in all.

Expectation vs. Reality

Brand behaviors don’t even come close to syncing up with people’s expectations on social. According to new data from Sprout, people want a response, and they want it much faster than most organizations are either willing or able to give

Without Social, It’s Just Media

From Sprout’s ongoing brand index and new consumer survey, here’s what we found: The average person sees social media much differently than the average brand.

While brands view Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as broadcast outlets for pumping out promotional content, consumers recognize these social channels for what they truly are: powerful portals for two-way dialogue.

In fact, 90% of people surveyed have used social in some way to communicate directly with a brand. What’s more, social surpasses phone and email as the first place most people turn when they have a problem or issue with a product or service, according to Sprout’s consumer survey.

Following this trend, The Sprout Index shows that the number of social messages needing a response from a brand has increased by 18% over the past year.

In spite of the high volume of messages that require a response, brands reply to just 11% of people (a number that’s been stuck in neutral since 2015).

What do brands prefer instead? Promotions! After all, who doesn’t want to visit a Facebook Page bombarded with coupon codes and unanswered inquiries when they’re having trouble at the airport or need to know if a wedding gift will arrive on time—right?

Of course, promotions play an important role in a brand’s overall communications strategy, but the balance on social is way off. Brands send 23 promotional messages for every 1 response given to their audience. That’s by far the worst ratio we have seen in the past three years since we began tracking brand engagement efforts (or lack thereof). It’s also resulted in 10% more brand messages on social from a year ago.

It gets worse. When brands respond—if they respond—they let people hang for an average of 10 hours, even though most people consider under 4 hours reasonable.

Sprout Stance
People aren’t asking for the world. They would simply like to hear back when they reach out to your brand. If your responses lag for a bit, that’s totally reasonable in the eyes of most people—but within an acceptable range of under 4 hours. After that, most people are out; in fact, they may even switch to a competitor. Brands need to rethink their social strategies and staff up accordingly. Social is a shared effort that should be tackled by all the parts of your organization that have some skin in the game—from sales to HR. The payoff of positioning yourself as a truly social business can be staggering, from its effect on retention to referrals to R&D.