At Mediabistro’s Socialize West conference in San Francisco today, Motivity Marketing CEO Kevin Ryan had a simple message for publishers and authors: respond to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers when they write about you.
He shared data from a survey of 1,300 adult Twitter users. The survey focused on a special kind of Twitter user–all the survey respondents said they “frequently tweet” and had used Twitter to complain about something.
The statistics were simple and direct: 83 percent liked or loved getting a response from a company on Twitter. Only four percent of the respondents didn’t like it when a company responded. However, 71 percent of the surveyed Twitter users said they had never been contacted by a company on Twitter.
How do you interact with your social network community?
Ryan also warned companies against using automated responses on Facebook or Twitter. He urged companies to turn off auto-response programs. On Twitter, auto-response programs send unhappy customers impersonal and inappropriate messages.
Ryan shares more tips and criticism on his busy Twitter feed.