Social media provides a great opportunity for reaching audiences and creating engagement, and many brands are apparently becoming aware of the importance of dialogue on social sites. This is what a new study from social media analyst SocialBakers suggests.
According to new data from SocialBakers, the number of questions that users post on brands´ Facebook pages has increased by 37% in less than a year. This is an indication that consumers are increasingly embracing social media as a tool for communication with brands, alongside traditional interaction channels.
The number of answered questions also rose over the same period, as brands started to take social media communication more seriously. Compared to the previous report, which looked at the period from April to June 2012, when brands responded to 45% of all questions asked, the latest response rate increased substantially, to 63%.
Overall, 51,600 questions were asked on UK brands´ Facebook pages in the first quarter of this year and 32,500 of them were answered. In the second quarter of 2012 the figures were 37,400 and 16,700 respectively. However, UK brands took an average of 25 hours to respond, which is slightly longer than the international average of 22 hours, SocialBakers found.
The company also noted that Facebook penetration in the UK stood at 50% in April, which means that 31,174,580 Britons logged onto the social platform last month.