incrediBILL - 2:40 am on Oct 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

If I started using twitter my customers would probably do the same thing you did - instead of emailing or phoning me during service hours they would blast out their questions on twitter. Once you open this channel it's hard to close it again.

By ignoring your customers complaining on Twitter you're simply doing that, ignoring them which is opportunity lost and bad customer service IMO. I'm not saying that you need to move support to Twitter, but at a minimum have someone, even an auto-responder, tell people where to go for help. Posting an 800 #, link to a help or contact page, whatever, is better than just leaving people to complain.

Trust me, it's a very nice perk to think that the company thought so much of their customer that they heard them and reached out to make first contact.

Likewise for Facebook.

most of the tweets are nonsensical fluff

If you follow people posting crap, er um FLUFF you get nothing but fluff. However, if you follow people in your industry posting about various topics with links and events you can get a really good useful feed to keep on top of the latest hot topics all day every day.

Like anything else, you get out of Twitter what you put into it.

It can be a very useful tool, or it can be crap, depends on how you use it and of course that goes for any social media, forum, etc.