How to Prepare for and Manage a Crisis
By Ksenia NewtonMar 23
Marketing
Published January 19th 2016
Research: The Telecoms Industry Has to Wake Up to Social in 2016
The telecommunications industry’s consumers demand a consistently functioning service.
As communications have taken up an ever increasing part of our lives, consumers expect to be connected at all times, come what may.
While the provision of a reliable service is taken for granted by consumers, failure is widely and loudly derided, potentially creating a social storm.
If anything does go wrong, consumers expect instant communication with their provider. This expectation is understandable; communication is their raison d’être.
You would expect these companies to be some of the most active on social media. Generally speaking these brands have high social visibility and are fairly mature in terms of social customer service.
Despite this, our report on Social Insights on the Telecommunication Industry reveals certain areas that can still be improved.
We examined the industry’s social media activity, investigated key customer service issues, and discussed other ways that telecommunication brands can use social analytics to enhance their social media presence.
An overview of telecoms Twitter activity
The below chart, taken from the report, shows that the brand accounts we analyzed do not author many tweets.
At present, only 0.7% of the total number of Tweets comes from owned accounts. In total, audiences control 80% of the conversation.
There is undoubtedly an opportunity here to take a greater role in directing what the audience are talking about.
However, this lack of original posts may be because the brands are so busy replying to customer queries. The vast majority of brand activity comes in the form of replies to audience concerns.
Despite the high number of posts and tweets directed at them, telecommunications companies are more active in replying than other industries we have previously covered.
Twitter activity by days of the week
While this is an area of success for the industry, there is still room to provide a better service.
One way telecom companies can improve is to redistribute their resources in order to better align their social media activity with their audiences, both in terms of days of the week, and hours of the day.
While brands are more active than their audience at the start of the week, they drop off towards the end of the week.
Audience activity is more stable throughout the week. It may be that the rise in brand activity on a Monday is an attempt to respond to any messages that were left unanswered over the weekend.
Responding in a timely matter is vital to any business, perhaps particularly so for this industry.
Previous Brandwatch research showed that the pace of brand response has a bigger impact upon customer satisfaction than effectiveness of resolution.
Twitter activity by hours of the day
We can see a similar situation for UK companies when breaking down their activity by the hour.
Whereas audience activity remains fairly constant throughout the day, brands are most active during the morning and early afternoon, and then become less active than their audience at around 15:00.
If it seems unrealistic to expect brand and audience activity to be better aligned than we see here, we can point to Australian telecommunications brands in our report who show an impressive degree of correlation in this area.
The takeaway: There’s a lot of room for improvement
While the telecommunications industry has high social visibility and provides good social customer service, there are opportunities to further improve their social presence.
These telecommunication brands have an opportunity to control more of the conversation by sending more of their own tweets, thereby steering the discussions towards topics of their choosing.
There is also an opportunity to better align audience and brand activity on social media. This can have a very positive effect, as timely replies are very important and expected in this fast paced world.
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