So, what about the power of social media to damage your company/ Experts say you should be active in monitoring your brand and “defending it” although they never explain how you can “fix” damage.
Well, here’s an interesting bit of research to consider.
In October, 2009 Pennsylvania State University releases some interesting numbers about comments made on Twitter related to different brand names. They found that about 29% of brand related tweets sampled were requests or offers of information about the brand or related product.
They found that about 48% of these tweets mentioned the brand but only in passing and not as a major focus of the tweet.
Here’s the interesting part. Experts in social media keep drumming in that angry customers will tell far more people about their poor customer experiences than happy customers will tell about their pleasant customer experience.
Not so, at least on Twitter, and according to this research. To quote from readwriteweb.com:
The remaining 22.3% of tweets were sentiment-related, meaning tweets in which a user was expressing an opinion about a brand, either negative or positive. What was surprising about this subset was that users were more likely to express positive tweets than they were to complain.
So, once again the data, although preliminary, does not support the hyperbole presented by social media experts. Not only do very few people who mention brands express opinions one way or the other, but if they do, they tend to express positive opinions!
