Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:43 pm

As a small business owner you have probably been told many times about how to use social media effectively and the advice that you are given about Twitter includes the number of times to tweet, what to tweet about, why shorter tweets are better and the importance real followers as opposed to just gathering numbers.

I want to add to this “wealth of knowledge” by telling you a true story that happened to me within the past couple of days, see if you can work out what the advice is before the end of the story 🙂

My partner and I have a friend who is disabled and also has a sick daughter,  they are in the process of moving house and had been told that their scheduled completion (and therefore their moving date) was next Monday, the 19th May.  However, I saw them on Tuesday this week, less than a week before they were due to move with the daughter in tears and the mum very upset.  It seemed that the Welsh Water search had not come through and that because of this the move was going to be delayed.  Mum didn’t know what to do apart from start to cancel the moving plans.

I heard this and my immediate thought was to look at Twitter and try something.  I tweeted  to Welsh Water about the problem and left it at that in the hope that someone at the other end would see it.

I was pleased to see a message to me a couple of hours later asking for contact details of my friend.  I didn’t have them to hand and told DwrCymru that I would pass them on as soon as I got home.  I did this on Tuesday evening and was amazed to get a phone call from my friend the following morning.  It seems that someone from Welsh Water contacted my friend by phone at 9 o’clock in the morning and that by 10am the search had been sent and arrived (my friend thinks I am awesome for getting a response when she had been told by her solicitors that all that could be done was to wait).  I of course thanked Welsh Water on Twitter for their help as soon as I heard about it and this message was picked up by a firm that monitors customer service and was retweeted by them to their followers.

At the start of this article I asked if you could work out what the advice was?

Well…  if you have a social media account you need to monitor it and act on messages. Even if the action is a response that you are sorry that nothing can be done it’s at least a response and gives the impression that you care about your customer.  Of course, if you can actually help your customer with their problem then that’s all the better.