"...making them look like uncaring money-grubbers."
You mean they are not?
The Facebook Pages for some of the UK's biggest retailers are awash with marketing messages, but often ignore questions and complaints from their customers, a new study has found. Amazon was the worst performing among the 10 UK retailers with the largest Facebook footprint – taken from Econsultancy's top 10 retailers rated by …
... so whatis it doing on there?
The daft thing is that all my customer-service dealings with Amazon over faulty goods, delivery problems etc. Have been impressive efficient and helpful.
Why on earth has Amazon got a Facebook presence? If it wants feedback and discussion it should build a forum on its site. If it wants to send out promotions it should ask its customers for permission to e-mail.
It is sufficiently capable that it should handle public interaction itself, rather than handing off to Facebook's sub-optimal pages where it has difficulty responding and coping.
Daft.
Motorola's Facebook updates are always good for a laugh. Every post they make is basically followed by a string of Android using Motorola customers asking when they're due updates, or basically shouting "Don't buy (Whatever motorola is advertising) because they'll just dump it after a week on the market"
Get off my lawn.
I suppose French Connection, River Island, Topshop and JD Sports' target audience only know about Twitter and Facebook.
Don't know what Amazon are doing on there. Or any other shop either, or Paypal for that matter, because as soon as any customer has a problem with anything purchased they're going to have to take it to e-mail.
You could argue that Facebook is hardly the place for the answering of disputes, rants and complaints. Sure, maybe engage with users about new stuff happening - heck, you want to complain, do it via their website FFS!
Ok, if the company specifically state customers can engage with Amazon about customer services via their facebook 'channel' - fair game - but they don't.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the wrong place for businesses to plonk their pathetic attempts at social advertising. I've built a number of nasty fan pages as part of my job - they suck, rarely have *any* impact at all in terms of revenue generating and just cheapen (if it's possible to cheapen it any more) the facebook 'experience'
I'll defend Amazons customer relations via their actual contact and dispute pages - over the years, I've *never* had any problems with Amazon. If something hasn't arrived, they've reshipped a replacement without argument. In 8 years, I've had not one single issue with Amazon.
I would *never* consider lodging a complaint via their facebook page - it's just pointless, hmm, a bit like facebook is for anything other than chatting/sharing with friends and family.
I'm not a facebook user - closed my account years ago - but I see it's purpose. It makes millions happy, enables communication with friends and family, but it's NOT a place for consumer complaints.
This research is just ... completely and utterly pointless... I wish marketing types would wake the fuck up and stop treating facebook as some sort of 'internet' alternative - it's a frikkin' social network FFS.
...and it's one which B2C businesses ignore at their peril. If you can spot a trending issue and provide a good response before it achieves "antennagate" levels of public awareness, then you reap the twin rewards of blocking the detractors before they get started, and providing an answer for future users searching t'internet for a fix for the same issue.
In essence, you need the ability to skim off relevant posts, comments and tweets and feed them into your helpdesk in the same way that your support lines and web pages do. These technologies exist, and they work.
If done properly, it's powerful. If done badly, well, you end up with customers finding themselves in a backwater, ignored and pissed-off because they're not used to looking beyond the first match on Google. If you're lucky, you'll lose a tiny proportion of your client base this way. If the ignored backwater is something the size of Facebook, on the other hand, then you probably need to re-think things...
>stop treating facebook as some sort of 'internet' alternative
Unfortunately for a lot of people Internet=Facebook=Internet in the same way that for 90% of the remainder Internet=WWW. I do worry at times about Facebook becoming the be all and end all of Internet experience for the majority of people.
As far as I'm concerned, any company using a Facebook page as one of their main customer interface channels is not professional. This goes double for companies that don't bother having an actual *real* webpage any more.
Given that Amazon are *entirely* a web-based retailer, who spend a considerable amount of time and money on their web presence, in what fucking world would it make sense for them to dick about on some other website? Especially one as dedicated to pointlessness as Facebook?
It's like a national hobby in the UK is not knowing how to get an issue resolved, and thus resorting to whingeing about it elsewhere instead of taking any kind of useful action.
There was a Reg article a few weeks ago saying that Zuckerberg was spending a lot of money paying businesses to advertise their Facebook pages, and you can see it on TV ads - they all have bloody Facebook pages now. So perhaps they will take the FB money but dont understand the implications of opening up another line of communication