
The recent South Park episode, Informative Murder Porn, that
addressed customer support problems in the cable TV industry made me curious to
learn how Comcast interacts with customers online. After analyzing their social media accounts
and website, I found that they focus on
Twitter,
Facebook,
YouTube, and a
little
Google+. Comcast has unique and effective strategies apparent on each social network they use.
Comcast has subdivided its brand into many different Twitter
accounts. The accounts range from
@comcast
and
@comcastcares to
@xfinitysports and
@comcastbusiness. By separating their accounts, Comcast can
tailor their content on each handle to different demographics. The
@comcast and
@xfinity accounts are
focused on corporate news and new content available on their cable
service. On the other hand,
@comcastcares focuses on customer support.
Recent publicity about cable companies’ lack of customer support caused
me to gravitate towards their
@comcastcares account. The accounts profile has their admin’s personal
photo and name. Their new admin, Bill
Gerth, is literally the face of Comcast’s customer support. Strategically, this is a smart plan for
Comcast because users who submit complaints see a person behind the
account. Users are more inclined to be
appropriate and pleased if they are talking with a person instead of an
automated program. In contrast, having
Gerth’s identity on the support account gives customers a reason to blame him
for problems. Overall, this strategy is
personalized and unique to Comcast. In
terms of content, the account mostly posts about problems with the
service. One tweet explained that “services
in the Denver area are being restored. I
apologize again for any inconvenience this may have caused”. Using the word ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ also
personalizes the message. Customer
problems seemed to only be addressed in private messages which served two
beneficial purposes. First, the customer
could get a personal response from Gerth addressing the problem. Second, their feed was not flooded with customer
complaints. Therefore, Comcast appears
as though their customers are satisfied with the services. Representing Comcast on this personal level
makes it challenging to “respond with empathy, but defend your brand” (Kip
Wetzel, former admin of
@comcastcares). In
all, Comcast’s customer support on Twitter seems to be far ahead of other
corporations, even though they still get bad publicity about their services.
Comcast has two Facebook pages,
Comcast and
XFINITY. These pages solely promote media
content available on their cable service.
The cover photo from XFINITY’s page was an ad for a new episode of Grey’s
Anatomy. Their pages consisted of ads for
TV shows in image form with a brief description of copy [include screenshot]. With the ability to easily post photos,
Comcast uses Facebook to promote their service and its content. The Facebook demographic is more likely to
see an ad appear in their newsfeed than on Twitter.

The
Comcast Cares Google+ page featured an image that stated
“We are here to help” but the image was of multiple employees sitting together
all on different devices. Since Google+ doesn’t have as much traffic,
the page was relatively dormant.
Comcast actively uses
YouTube for tutorials, promotional
ads, and TV guide style videos. Many of
their videos are in Spanish because a large portion of their customers are
Spanish speakers. Their “How To
Self-Install XFINITY Internet” tutorial video had over 150,000 views. Comcast quickly replied when users commented
with questions about installation.
I found it slightly ironic that they had an internet set up tutorial
online, but most of their demographic has phones that can access the video.
Comcast’s Facebook pages were focused on advertising new
shows while there Twitter feeds were geared toward customer service. Comcast’s Facebook demographic is more likely
to see an ad appear in their news feed and not use Facebook for customer
support. Twitter is a much more
efficient way for their demographic to see what problems are occurring and ask
for assistance. On YouTube, they included
helpful tutorials and their most popular ads.
Specifically tailoring their content for each social network developed a
coherent and effective message to customers.
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