Over the past two decades, social media have become an integral part of our society. Social media in general, and social networks in particular, enables global communication, knowledge sharing, and message exchange, regardless of location and time. The immediacy of social media presents a new reality to companies that face consumers who expect immediate interaction, change their opinions rapidly, and make prompt decisions. To keep pace in this era of social networking, many companies adopt social media as a leading channel to communicate with their customers, and communicate information to their customers. In fact, research shows that social media, and in particular Twitter, is often used by companies as a part of their Customer Relations Management (CRM) efforts, denoted Social CRM, or SCRM. This correlates well with consumers preferences and expectations: reports show that 30% of social media users prefer customer service via social media over traditional customer service call centers, people under 35 spend nearly four hours a day on social media, and most of that time is being spent engaging with brands. Moreover, about 37% of the people have used X/Twitter for customer service.
Our work in this regards focuses on companies' dynamics on X/Twitter: the growth and decay rates of followers, the desicion used when following/unfollowing companies, and the resulted degree distribution of existing, new and departing followers (spoiler: different mixtures of power law and exponential distributions). We further develop rate equations model to capture and simulate companies' dynamics. Qualitatively, we analysed over 70 S&P companies, and identified a 2-stage growth model of the use of Twitter as SCRM: branding, were the focus is on customer acquisition up to a certain volume, and social care, were the focus is on retaining customers and increase engagement. Evident from the data, we argue that companies have very little control over their growth stage, and in fact cannot moderate the number of followers, aiming to increase engagement.
Related publications include:
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Welcman, Y., Yahav, I., and Schwartz, D.G. The Journey to Engaged Customer Community: Evidential Social CRM Maturity Model in Twitter, Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, 36:397–416 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/asmb.2495