According to Brand Monitor™, a social media analytics provider, only 9% of social media conversations are deemed actionable. Brand Monitor analyzed approximately 980,000 Tweets, Facebook updates, forums discussions, blogs posts and news stories for Amazon, Best Buy, Dell, eBay and Walmart. Of the 980,000 conversations analyzed 88,000 were deemed actionable and hence need to be responded to every month.

The actionable conversations were important conversations that affected the brand and had to be responded to on an urgent basis. The non-actionable conversations were the neutral conversations around the brand that did not need attention.

The posts were categorized according to organizational functions and by need to respond.

• All complaints regarding shipping, product defects, damages, repair etc. were bucketed under customer service;
• All suggestions or complaints regarding promotions, logos, web-site, store changes, pricing, deals etc. were categorized under Sales and Marketing and finally,
• All feedback and suggestions regarding a new product range or new features to be introduced etc. were bucketed under Product Development and Innovation.

Based on this, 90% of Dell’s actionable posts were Customer Care issues and the remaining 10% were feedback for the Sales and marketing team to act upon.

Similarly, 50% of actionable conversations around Walmart were customer service complaints, 38% were feedback for Sales and Marketing, and a small percentage (12%) of the posts were suggestions for Product Development.

Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Dell have to analyze and respond to more than 110,000 actionable posts on average, each month.