Chris Campbell

According to Search Engine Watch , 7 in 10 Twitter users expect to receive a response from brands that they reach out to. Of these, 53 percent expect it in less than an hour. And if they are giving a complaint about the customer experience or providing negative feedback, this number rises to 72 percent.

Meanwhile, on Facebook Pages, business owners can now track their own response times and see how well they are handling incoming messages and feedback from customers.

With real-time engagement on social media getting even realer — and the window for responding to customers becoming smaller — more and more brands and marketers have begun to implement faster response times as part of their social media strategy. They are positioning themselves to listen more closely and respond more quickly than ever — to tweets and mentions, tags and likes, and hearts and comments.

But do consumers also expect your brand to respond to their online reviews and customer feedback on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor?

And how quickly do they expect to hear back from you?

Responses to online reviews and customer feedback are expected According to research by our team at ReviewTrackers, customers do expect brands to respond to their reviews — but the time frame is a little bit longer than when customers reach out to brands on social media.

We also found that 52 percent of customers expect to hear back from brands within 7 days of giving an online review, particularly one that’s negative or critical.

1 in 4 are more demanding, expecting a review response within 3 days, while 21 percent expect brands to have a response time of 24 hours or less.

While these numbers suggest that consumers are willing to wait longer for brands to post responses on review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, managing customer feedback on these sites is no less critical than managing what customers are saying on Facebook and Twitter.

Beyond recognizing that social media moves fast, your brand must also tune into the voice of your customers and pay attention as they look to other feedback channels to make themselves heard.

Leveraging reviews to drive social media engagement and performance The value of online reviews and publicly visible customer feedback is also demonstrated by their shelf life as pieces of content. Compared to tweets and Facebook posts, reviews are likely to stay relevant for a longer period of time.

Shelf life of online reviews A Search Engine Land report shows that, for 69 percent of consumers, online reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant. The expiry date of reviews is shorter for 15 percent, who believe that the only relevant reviews are the ones written within the last 2 weeks. Shelf life of tweets Moz suggests that tweets probably have the life of a “short-lived fruit fly” — 18 minutes, to be exact. Another study , meanwhile, found that 92 percent of user engagement with tweets — impressions, clicks, and shares — occur within the first 48 hours of posting. Shelf life of Facebook posts According to social media analytics company Wiselytics, 75 percent of engagement on a Facebook post happens within the first 5 hours. The potential reach of posts on Facebook isn’t so promising, either: 75 percent of the people who will get to see a Facebook post will have seen it in the first 2 hours. With the shelf life of online reviews shown to be longer than that of tweets and Facebook posts, it makes sense for brands to maximize social media ROI by integrating review content and review responses into their strategy.

Even if your brand is more active on Twitter and Facebook than on Yelp and TripAdvisor, there are ways to leverage reviews in ways that drive social media engagement and boost performance.

On Twitter, for example, you can share screenshots of your best reviews. Or you can share links with your community of fans and followers in order to facilitate the generation of new reviews. On Facebook, you can enable the Reviews feature so that your Facebook Page serves as a channel through which customers can publicly share their feedback — and your brand can quickly respond.

The rise of online reviews as one of today’s most powerful forms of customer feedback provides another great example of how customers are having conversations about your brand, regardless of whether you like it or not. As you seek to implement or finetune your social media management and response strategy, make sure you also join the conversations happening on online review sites and other similar feedback channels. If you’re not quick to engage and respond, one of your competitors might be.

This post originally appeared in Social Media Today .

Chris Campbell

Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area 5K followers 500+ connections

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Not These Ovaries

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