One of the great things about social media is its immediacy — and that immediacy is also its greatest risk. According to Sandra Fathi at the SMX Social Media Marketing Conference, here are the deadlines for recovery from a social media mistake:
- on Twitter, you have to respond within minutes, and after two hours it’s too late
- on Facebook, you have up to twelve hours to get that response in
- on blogs, you have twenty-four hours to respond appropriately
- on mainstream media, you have 1-2 days to put your response out
What About Regular Responses?
The timetable above is on correcting mistakes, developed after studying many scenarios (it’s a good slide show to use in training your social media team), but do you think that the deadline for regular responses on social media are much different?
I don’t think so.
Now, I haven’t done a study, but ask yourself how much backstory you have read on the social media you are involved with. It gets overwhelming to keep up with that, right? But the immediacy of social media is perfect for creating and maintaining customer relationships. Social media lead generation is a very effective marketing strategy, but the effectiveness only lasts as long as the responsiveness does.
Build Response Time Into Scheduling
When your business is developing its social media strategies, make sure that the appropriate response times are built into the scheduling so your social media manager has the time to interact on these powerful platforms.
It’s obvious, for instance, that those who tweet are going to fly off again fast. But those who are friends on Facebook or blogs don’t expect responses within minutes.
It’s also obvious that whoever your social media manager is, that person or team has to be well-qualified to represent your business. The interactions on social media are the perceptions about your business, and it is definitely worth investing carefully to make sure your brand shines bright.