Do Brands Care About You or Your Social Media Popularity?

ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 17, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The days of waiting on hold "for the next available representative to take your call" are over. Social media has transformed customer service as consumers seek immediate responses from companies via their social media properties. Yet, with millions of consumers on social media every day, companies get flooded with comments making it nearly impossible for social media managers to respond to each request.

So, how do companies choose who gets a response? The answer may lie in your social media popularity, according to new research from Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. After examining an enormous amount of Twitter data from major U.S. airlines, researchers found that companies are more likely to engage with customers who have a high number of followers.

The study looked at major U.S. airlines and analyzed how they responded to customers on Twitter. Although airlines use Twitter to address complaints and compliments, they answered less than 40% of requests they received for engagement. All airlines examined in this study showed favoritism towards users with a high number of followers and replied to them over users with a low number of followers, although the degree of such favoritism varies by airlines.

"Twitter users with a large number of followers are better poised to influence other users with their perceptions of a brand," said co-author Huaxia Rui, assistant professor of computers and information systems at Simon Business School. "Knowing these users can be highly influential, brands will have more incentive to allocate their resources prioritizing response for those they view as influential customers, thus minimizing risk and halting a potential social media crisis."

The research is based on a large sample of tweets mentioning the official accounts of these airlines in 2014 and reply tweets by the airlines. Researchers divided the tweets sent to the airlines into three categories: complaints, compliments, or neutral tweet in order to discover what type of tweets were more likely to garner a response from the airlines.
 
An airline's response time also varies greatly by airline. For example, the average response time, conditional on getting a response, is roughly 18 minutes for American Airlines but is more than four hours for Delta Airlines. Interestingly, the research finds that American Airlines took more time when replying to Twitter users with more followers compared with users who are less popular.
 
"A customer complaint is an opportunity to take an unsatisfied customer and turn them into a satisfied one. And, unlike phone complaints, all these tweets are public, so the world is watching how customers are being treated – on a case by case basis," said Abraham Seidmann, Xerox professor of computer and information systems and operations management at Simon Business School. "The counter-intuitive finding for American Airlines hints at an underlying strategy for what the company perceived as high-risk tweets. The airline may spend more time carefully crafting a response to a customer they view as more influential so they do not make a hasty reply that may spark a crisis."
 
The research, titled "Engaging Customers on Social Media: Empirical Evidences from Airline Industry," is co-authored by professors Huaxia Rui and Abraham Seidmann of Simon Business School, and Priyanga Gunarathne, a PhD student from Simon Business School.
 
To learn more about the research at Simon Business School, please visit: www.simon.rochester.edu.
 
About Simon Business School
 
The Simon Business School is currently ranked among the leading graduate business schools in the world in rankings published by the popular press, including Bloomberg Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Financial Times. The Financial Times recently rated the School No. 3 in the world for economics and No. 5 in the world for finance. More information about Simon Business School is available at www.simon.rochester.edu.
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