Do we need social media?

As you have probably seen, J D Weatherspoons have announced that they are closing all their social media accounts, saying it will free up the pub managers to do other things and they don’t think it will affect the level of their business.

At a time when most organisations are seeing a need to use social media this is an interesting move. There are obvious benefits of social media, principally being able to communicate with customers, recognising that the customers are the ones driving many of the social media conversations. One thing that I have often said is that even if an organisation isn’t on social media it doesn’t stop their customers talking about them on it, especially for complaints. But being there enables the organisation to be part of the conversation and to respond directly to the comments.

However, the reverse of this is that for a low cost organisation such as Weatherspoons the cost of time for people to respond to social media is likely to be quite high so cutting that can help them keep prices for customers low. And people know what to expect from Weatherspoons so maybe they don’t need to worry too much about what is being said about them.

Time will tell if this is a good move for Weatherspoons, or if it they will be negatively affected by this. What do you think?

The story is reported here

Update – There is a good blog discussing this with varying opinions on Econsultancy – link here