Your Social Media Presence as the Tie Breaker for Prospective Customers

So its official, after months of agonizing over which SaSS Recurring Billing platform to launch our new product with, I have chosen Chargify over Recurly. While I researched and compared features and costs based on my business requirements, the decision actually came down to something else – their social presence. At the end of my technical comparison I was nearly set on Recurly because of their Salesforce.com and Mailchimp integrations (although Chargify’s unlimited Free Customers is equally compelling), however I chose to look at each of their Twitter streams as an indicator of customer support.

What I found was rather interesting. Recurly’s Twitter stream was populated almost entirely with customer interactions around product issues and bugs. They seemed to be on top of these and providing good support, however it made me question the quality of their product. Chargify on the other hand was far more positive and chalked full of retweeting positive customer interactions and upcoming features. In addition to Twitter, Recurly has a rather light-weight Facebook page where as Chargify has a presence across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flicker and a customer focused blog.

I took all of these inputs as indicators of the overall commitment to customer support, as well as the quality of product I would be working with. I was much more warm and fuzzy after sifting through the Chargify customer interactions. Whether or not this will be the case in two months is irrelevant – today was the customer moment of truth when the purchasing decision was made.

The moral of the story, your social media strategy and presence matters. Think carefully about the perception you are sending prospective customers.