The Best and Worst UK Brands in Social Customer Service

PRAGUE, January 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Social media analytics company, Socialbakers, has just released its Q4 results, showing the best and worst of brands in terms of social media customer care.

Through an industry standard it calls Socially Devoted, it measures how often brands respond to questions from their fans and how quickly.

The results, which rank pages dedicated to the UK, show which brands care about their fans on social media and the culprits who ignore their questions completely.

The top 10 most socially devoted brands in the UK included Virgin Media (which responded to 85% of questions), Next, Argos and Boohoo.com. The worst offenders for not responding to fans on Facebook include Amazon, who didn't respond to a single customer question in the three-month period, T-Mobile, and Xbox. Interestingly, in the US results T-Mobile scored as one of the most Socially Devoted brands in that country.

As Socialbakers CEO, Jan Rezab, explained: "In recent years there has been a shift away from brands simply seeking to collect the highest number of fans. What is important is how you interact and serve them. There is no point in having a page that offers no value to your fans beyond pushing photos of your products. Your fans will most likely see your posts as spam, hide your feed and then your online marketing efforts are seen by no one."

When Socialbakers started to collect this data in April 2012 it found that over 70% of questions were not responded to on brands' Facebook Pages worldwide. However in the last nine months response rates improved drastically and now only 45% of questions are not answered.

In worldwide rankings, the top 10 Socially Devoted brands included Personal Argentina (a south American mobile company), KLM, and Tesco. Blackberry, Netflix, and Starbucks ranked amongst the worst in the world.

Jan Rezab added: "We're really encouraged by the number of brands who improved their Socially Devoted scores since we began measuring in April. However we remain surprised by the number of brands that refuse to acknowledge their fans on social media. Do you really want to buy food from a brand that won't talk to you?"

Note to editors: Further information available on socially-devoted.com. Graphics and more data available on request.