"We do all of these things" @VodafoneUK

A couple of months ago, I was doing some groundwork on the social media strategies of some of the top brands in the mobile phone operator market. I was initially looking through each of their social media pages. There were some of the questions I wanted to try and get answers to. Does the brand have a specific strategy on a particular channel that is identifiable from interactions on the page? Is there two way communication or is it just the brand shouting in to deaf ears? What is the brand trying to achieve through their presence on these social channels? 

One of the brands I happened to be looking at was Vodafone. I landed on the @VodafoneUK Twitter page and found it interesting. There were the names of the staff designated to handle the interactions on the page and a quick look at the page would have told any person that Vodafone were basically answering their customers questions and issues they were experiencing with the service. The page just screamed "customer service". Nevertheless, I decided to scroll down through almost a week's tweets just to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious. At the end, I just confirmed my initial assumption that the page was being used primarily as a customer service channel. 

Then I read what they had mentioned in the 'Bio' section. It mentioned that the page was meant for promotions/offers, competitions and product news. It didn't say a word about customer service. I found that strange and decided to ask them. 

It's probably a good thing that Vodafone were saying they were doing just what their online audience was demanding of them. Still, I wasn't entirely convinced because when you have a majority of the tweets answering customer queries and complaints, something related to customer service ought to be part of the bio section. 


The company's headline on the page is what a lot of people would look at when they started to 'follow' them. If people just looked at the tweets they would in all probability think just like I did and send tweets if they were having trouble with their services. So its no wonder that they had to do "what people ask us" as those who didn't read the Bio section will look at the tweets and say "Well, looks like we can just ask them about that problem we're having over here". What I found even more puzzling was that they had  a separate account called @VodafoneUkdeals that was meant for deals and online exclusives which now has this headline.

After my tweet to them, I kept visiting the @VodafoneUK page once in a while to see if there was a change but for a few days it didn't happen. Recently, I happened to check back (I was trying my luck on their #mademesmile campaign; that's another story if you're interested) and I did see something different this time. 

Vodafone probably realized that they had made a mistake. The 'Bio' now is a lot more generic and does not spell out anything specific that they aim to do on Twitter. So it was either just oversight that caused the mistake or there was a flawed social media strategy, wherein they were not exactly clear what they wanted to use Twitter for. I think it's the latter, as they still don't seem to be entirely sure if they should use it for multiple activities or just customer service. This is true for a lot of brands who are just "there" on social media websites but are still very unclear of what they aim to achieve out of that presence.

I don't want to claim here that I prompted the change on their Twitter page, but when asked they didn't acknowledge the fact I was pointing to and then changed it in course of time.  What does that say? Well, I'll let you make up your mind on that one.