post by Stephanie Nelson
It’s a little-known fact, but several online outlets have a timer on you, and your dilly-dallying may be killing your online presence.
Facebook, for example, times you when your business page receives a direct message. The sooner you respond, the more likely your page will be marked as responsive, and you’ll be rewarded with a Very Responsive Badge. This, in turn, instills trust from the get-go with the visitors to your page and buys you a little time to keep them from going straight to your competitor.
Yelp is another site that grades you on your response time. Per a post on Yelp’s support site, “[y]our response time is the median time you took to respond to new messages in the last 30 days. Your response rate is the percentage of new messages you responded to in the last 30 days, excluding messages that have just arrived to give you some time to respond.” Your response time is shown on your business page, so again it goes to instill trust with visitors. Be mindful – Yelp’s response time DOES NOT factor in your business hours, so you’re being graded whether you’re open or not.
Finally, there’s Instagram. As mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, if you don’t engage with comments on your posts within an hour or so, Instagram appears to limit how much it shows other posts you put up.
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