The other day I was listening to the Social Pros Podcast with Jay Baer of Convince and Convert and Jeffrey Rohrs of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They were interviewing Julie Hopkins of Gartner Research and were talking about her blog post “I am Loyalist, Read My Tweet. Please?”

She is an avid runner and took the time to take a picture of her Saucony’s to Tweet to the brand and their campaign hashtag. But she never received a response. This prompted me to conduct my own experiment, which I collected the results and shared them with my Social Media Marketing course. As you can see above I tweeted to three brand’s Twitter handles and campaign hashtags with what I thought was positive brand messages. It was also relevant to the cold weather many are experiencing and talking about in the country.

Of the three brands Honda and Under Armour responded. Honda even asked a follow up question to keep the engagement going. To this day Saucony has not responded. My experience was no different than Julie Hopkins. Is Saucony not listening or have they decided not to invest in the resources to make individual responses?

Saucony actually has a Find Your Strong  website that aggregates all Twitter posts to the brand. Smart strategy to collect consumer generated brand content, but does this equal the level of engagement as a response in Twitter?

I love Saucony and have been wearing their running shoes for years. I don’t know if the no response will make me switch to another brand, but it did put a ding in my image of the company. At the very least I will be less likely to talk so highly of them to other runners.

What do you think? Are our expectations of brands too high? Is it unrealistic to expect an individual response from a big brand? According to one study 70% of consumers expect a response from brands on Twitter. Share on X

Do you think response or no response in social media will impact brand performance?