14 DAY TRIAL // Companies with a Facebook page tend to ignore user support inquiries that come through this medium, shows a study by Locowise, a social media analytics platform.
Even if Facebook seems like the perfect place to get in touch with your users, being much easier to exchange messages and information without being limited by a 140-character limit, the Locowise study reveals how the companies themselves are at fault for ignoring Facebook's real-time interaction capabilities.
Their lack of interest, support staff and/or professionalism is the only one to blame and not the platform itself, which if used properly can be even more useful and faster to use than classic tools like forum boards, email, and help-desks.
Half of Facebook pages let users post on their timeline
Locowise went on to analyze the top 900 Facebook pages for real-life businesses, all totaling almost 300 million likes.
The first worrisome fact they discovered was that for 49% of all analyzed Facebook pages, users didn't have the ability to post on the page's timeline. While this could be done to avoid spam, prohibiting users to post on your Facebook page also prevents them from asking any type of support, not many of them knowing to send a private message, or leave a comment on an existing story.
Out of the ~450 pages left, 67% received less than 10 posts from users asking for help, 29% got 10 to 100 posts while only 4% got 100 or more posts.
87% of all user requests went unanswered
Now for the worrisome part: from all user posts, 87% were unanswered, and 67% of the ~450 pages didn't even bother to reply to one single post.
And if there were pages where someone from the company replied, it was only to 37% of all the user posts. So a pretty lackluster effort even from the ones that did react.
There were companies that did reply to all user posts, only 10.5% of the ~450 pages, but these pages never got more than 3 support requests during the month (May 2015) which the study analyzed.
The bright side is that 33% of all user posts got a reply in less than an hour after they posted on the Facebook page, which is an encouraging sign.
There are some companies that care and have learned to fully utilize Facebook's features
The Locowise report also highlighted a series of companies that managed to keep in touch with their userbase via Facebook, and these are: Domino's Pizza (121 responses covering 73% of all posts), Virgin Media (111 responses covering 53% of all posts), Vodafone (94 responses covering 86% of all posts), Missguided (52 responses covering 31% of all posts), and Nando's (43 responses covering 66% of all posts).
What can be learned from this is that if you don't want your users asking for help on Facebook, do disable this feature, and also provide a visible link on your Facebook profile where they can ask for support.
There's nothing more annoying and unprofessional than a company which totally ignores one of its users, right there in the eyes of the world, on its public Facebook page. But we kind of already knew that from 2014.