I get to speak  to a lot  of businesses as many of them are interested in their engagementIndex customer care scores on Twitter and then contact me to chat about how to raise them. I therefore get to hear some interesting comments from some well known brands and big businesses. I wanted to share with you some of those comments.

To my mind, far too many businesses think they are in control of social media. They will reply when it suits them to the tweets or people that it feels it wants to reply to, or may well ignore everyone, or may decide that they will only service their account from Mon-Fri 9am – 6pm. This attitude they feel that they control social media to start with is totally misguided. They don’t.. We do. We the customers / consumers are in control of things and many big businesses don’t like that fact.

We will talk about brands, message brands when it suits us, not when it suits them. We will message them and mention them when it suits us even if they are not on Twitter. It has been very noticeable that more and more customers turn to Twitter to message businesses with questions, ask advice, complain, congratulate them, suggest new ideas for them but sadly over 70% of these tweets are ignored. Why? Because far far too many businesses are still in the broadcast mode of life, they want us to listen to them but don’t want to listen or reply to us.

A well known high St Bank said to me that they were going to start off slowly on Twitter and build up. Sorry that is again misguided. When you open your business on Twitter with an account, people will just start to message you. They wont think, hold on, they are new lets leave it a while until they are up to speed. Again, its that mentality of thinking its about you, its not, its about us.

Another well known retailer told me that some reply even days later was better than no reply. I disagreed. If you cant reply to someone within 48 hours, then to me don’t bother. It just highlights how you may be on Twitter but really not that committed and occasionally look at your account, and reply when it suits you – again the wrong mentality which suggest that its about you and not us.

But perhaps the biggest thing that I see is that so many brands and businesses have not embraced Twitter. I have explained to many that how we communicate with businesses over the next say 10 – 20 years will dramatically change. My dad who is 87 will still type a letter or phone, I will tweet, but out children will certainly use some form of social media as that is what they have grown up with. Therefore any businesses that don’t utilise Twitter to communicate with us and future generations will for sure miss out on tons of potential business. In my view over time call centre usage will drop as social media interactions massively increase.

What do you think? Have I got it wrong? Am I misguided? Feel free to comment in the box below..