Tweet limit impacts Social CRM effectiveness - just ask O2
February 1st, 2012 by Lloyd Gofton
The development of Social CRM has been well documented over the last few years, and we have written a number of posts on the subject, sharing Liberate Media’s experiences of Social CRM campaigns.
However, a very real issue in the development of Social CRM, at least in terms of Twitter usage, was highlighted last week by O2 who exceeded their daily limit while attempting to respond to a breaking communications crisis. O2 asked Twitter for an extension on the amount of tweets it could send, (Twitter’s daily limit is 250 direct messages a day, and 1,000 tweets) but this was refused.
O2′s PR and social media campaigns manager, James Paterson, confirmed the issue at last week’s 1-2-1 Digital Strategy Summit, run by Marketing Week. In fact, he confirmed that O2 actually accrued the same amount of ‘mentions’ in one day as it does in a normal week.
If you are not familiar with the issue, O2 was attempting to respond to the news that user’s mobile phone numbers were being leaked to websites that they visited.
In the Marketing Week piece, Paterson said it was important that O2 did “not stay quietly in [its] shell” as news circulated about the data leaks and that the company employed a strategy immediately to respond to user questions and communicate that it was investigating the issue.
The mobile operator did utilise other tactics as part of its Social CRM response, i.e. preparing a “Q&A” blog post to explain the technical reasons behind the data leak and to apologise for the concern caused.
Paterson said: “We wanted to respond to as many people as possible with fair answers. In the past we may have just given a Q&A to the well-known media outlets, but our people understand that if you answer queries and communicate to people on social media straight away, problems tend to be resolved more quickly.”
However, although O2 followed a clear strategy for its response, it was hindered by Twitter’s account limit.
Twitter has commented on the limit issue: “Limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter, and reduce downtime and error pages. For the sake of reliability, we’ve placed some limits on account actions like following, API requests, direct messages, and updates.”
“The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.”
These rules obviously reduce the effectiveness of Social CRM response mechanisms for large brands, although in fairness Twitter was not designed as a CRM channel, therefore it has no responsibility to look out for such problems.
However, as Twitter continually looks towards brands to bolster its revenue strategy, it’s likely that it will not only expand this function, but also charge for it, a charge that i’m sure the majority of brands would be willing to pay.
In this instance O2 responded to a breaking issue well, and tried to be open by answering as many of its customer tweets as possible, but this was quickly curtailed when Twitter would not allow any further tweets that day.
This issue, and the others that are sure to follow, further highlight a real flaw in many social CRM strategies, while also drawing attention to a revenue opportunity for Twitter. If Twitter is not already working on a paid response they are likely to be jumping on it rapidly in the near future.
Tags: O2, SCRM, Social CRM, tweet limit, twitter
