I’ve written before about social media raising the bar on customer expectations. (See: “Know what influences your customer to maximize the new digital trends.”) A new generation of customers expects to have a meaningful dialogue with you through social media channels. They find information and make decisions based on their online interactions; and in turn they share that information among their own communities.

Many of you understand you need to have a social media presence and do; however, many are not leveraging the input.  According to a study of 1180 companies around the globe by software company Satmetrix Systems, a significant number of B2C and B2B companies of all sizes are not tracking what their customers are saying and in turn not responding to customer feedback.

The study found:

  • Social media tracking: 39 percent of companies have no social media tracking in place. B2B companies fare worse – 51 percent have no tracking compared to 22 percent of the B2C companies surveyed
  • Measure or quantify social media: Sixty seven percent of companies do not measure or quantify social media. This increases to 75 percent for B2B. Even among those companies that have some form of quantification, 56 percent just count the comments and followers; only four percent have any form of sentiment (positive or negative) analysis
  • Customer response: More than half (55 percent) of the companies surveyed ignore customers who provide feedback via social media by having no process in place to respond. The figure increases to 69 percent for B2B companies compared to 42 percent for B2C.
  • Social media strategy: Sixty percent of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy (they do nothing to track or follow up, only track or only follow up). Regionally, North America leads the way with 43 percent of North American companies having a follow-up process compared to about 25 percent in other regions.

Social media can help you build your brand when you know what your customers care about. Don’t miss the opportunity to track what they are saying in order to respond to their concerns and better yet leverage their positive input.