As social media continues to flow and change almost daily, it can become quite a challenge for a business to keep up with the changing landscape and to continuing being effective with their social media marketing strategy. SproutSocial has recently released its Sprout Social Index which is a comprehensive study of social media behavior over the last year and a quarter. What they discovered, has startled many brands into re-evaluating their social media marketing strategies.
Over the course of 2016, and the first quarter of 2017, Sprout Social looked at 289,000 social media profiles across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. They evaluated and examined nearly four billion messages across those three platforms and found some surprising answers to their questions.
Getting to your messages and comments is critical to your brand awareness and over all image on social media. Past research has revealed that customers expect a response to their comments within an hour. Sprout Social found that time seemed irrelevant as only ten percent of the brands they surveyed even bother to respond to customer queries and complaints. And, with regard to the time factor, the research found that the average response time for a company was eleven hours. A full three out of four customers surveyed stated that humor was a huge factor in their trying a brand. Over 70% don’t appreciate a brand discussing politics and nearly 90% don’t appreciate brands making fun of their followers and they are inclined to go elsewhere when a social media presence takes on a rather snarky attitude and projection.
Here are just some of the other findings from the Sprout Social study:
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
