Twitter: The Complaint Box?

Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms alongside other popular sites such as Facebook and Instagram – but how an individual interacts with Twitter seems to be widely different to how they interact with the others.

And like most individuals, when I log onto Twitter nowadays, I am usually either a) looking at the news or b) complaining about the service I have received from a certain brand. The instantaneous, live updates make news reading quick and engaging on the platform, but complaints seem to be a huge part of many people’s usage, not just my own.

But why has Twitter become the social media platform for moaning? When it comes to complaints, hiding behind a computer screen is much easier – but, crucially, response times are often a lot quicker due to the visibility and transparency of social media. Twitter enables brands to have a better engagement with customers, but if something goes wrong, it doesn’t always work in their favour.

Generally, how we interact with brands is changing massively. Customers are looking for more of a dialogue than a monologue from an organisation. And even though using Twitter for complaints could have negative connotations, brands can often reverse this interaction to have a positive outcome and there are millions of examples of how brands have done this such as Nokia.

However, despite the increasing use of Twitter to complain, it is evident that brands have still not utilised this platform to have an open dialogue with their customers. A staggering 71% of brands fail to reply to online complaints.

In the infographic by Convince and Convert, you can see that 83.5% of participants either ‘loved’ or ‘liked’ being contacted by a company as a result of their tweet. Brands need to be tapping into this space to utilise having a more human connection with their customers. It’s probable that these unsatisfied customers are just looking for someone to listen – and that’s something 70% of brands should not be ignoring, as it seems that for many, the silence is excruciating.

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