Recent research from Simply Measured has examined how the world’s top 100 brands use Twitter as a customer service channel, and new data from Socialbakers shows that most brands’ efforts leave a lot to be desired when it comes to answering questions posted to their Twitter profiles. In Q4 2012, just 32% of questions posted to brands’ Twitter profiles were answered, on average, and that didn’t mark much of an improvement from Q3 (31%). By comparison, brands answered an average of 55% of questions posed to their Facebook pages in Q4, per separate Socialbakers data.
The most “socially devoted” sectors on Twitter in Q4 were finance (46.1% of questions answered), airlines (45.7%), and telecom (43.5%). (Finance and airlines are also tops on Facebook.)
On the other end of the scale, automotive (10.5%) and alcohol (11.8%) brands are only responding to about 1 in 10 questions posted to their Twitter profiles. Surprisingly, those are both improvements from Q2.
Not only are brands lagging in response rates on Twitter, they’re also taking a long time to get to the questions. In Q4, response time increased to an average of 6 hours, from 5.1 the previous quarter. While that seems like a long time, it’s still half the time it takes brands to respond on Facebook (13.7 hours on average in Q4).