Failure is a valuable teaching tool. “Learn from your mistakes,” we’re often told, but it’s even better to learn from others’ mistakes. While many libraries use social media, there’s not much data available as to how effectively they use it. Not so with businesses, where effective use of social media can translate to money gained or lost; their use of social media is pretty well researched. A few current studies of social media and business are cited below, which point out some of the failures in businesses’ use of social media. Learn from their mistakes.
- Customers say small business social media efforts failing: Survey says (Huffington Post/Rieva Lesonsky) “Just 8 percent report being satisfied or very satisfied with businesses’ responsiveness on social media. Almost one-third say their complaints or messages had been ignored by companies. And a whopping 88 percent say if they see that their or other customers’ complaints on social media are ignored, they’d be less likely to buy from those companies in the future.”
- Why small business fails in social media (Media Badger/Giles Crouch) “What we found was one overall reason businesses just plain flopped in social media engagement. Committment. Any small business owners out there will probably agree; there’s just not enough time in a day to run the business and pay attention to all the added challenges of engaging in social media.”
- 59% of customers don’t know about their banks’ social media presence (ReadWriteWeb/Alicia Eler) “Even though financial institutes have increased social networking activity, ComScore says that only 18% of customers knew that their financial institutions had a presence on social networks. A total 59% had no idea, and 24% were unsure of what their financial institutions were doing on social media sites.”
- Research shows just 6% of companies value listening online (Simply Zesty/Lauren Fisher) “This trend is worrying for social media, as it means it will be hard for it to progress beyond the ‘fun’, experimental phase, to reach its true potential for joining up individuals and organisations, and indeed for it to reach the full advantages it can offer businesses by providing keen insight into what your customers actually want and what they are doing online.”
One more fact:
The last article quoted above uses data from a study commissioned by Dell, which also found that over 98% of companies are making use of social media at some level.
