Michael When Twitter first came out, back in 2006, with the concept of sending short messages with a maximum of 140 characters, I thought, "I'll give that silly club a year before investors pull the plug," but even I am occasionally wrong! Trump now communicates almost exclusively through this channel with the unwashed masses. And many companies even handle their customer service through it.
If a website or a purchased product doesn't work, I no longer call the hotline, but instead, I send out a so-called "tweet" in which I mention the company with @company_name. Both my 'followers' and the company will read it, and soon there will be hectic activity there, so that company representatives will hopefully respond few minutes, visible to to potentially hundreds of thousands of the company's followers: "Yes, yes, the error is known, and the engineers are working on it!"
A win-win for everyone involved: The dissatisfied customer feels taken seriously, and the company demonstrates, in a PR-effective manner, that they immediately take action on customer complaints to rectify any issues. In Figure 2, you can see, for example, that I had tried to purchase a book on the website of the specialist book publisher "Manning," but their shopping cart software, which seemed to have been programmed by retrained shopping cart pushers, wouldn't let me buy the desired book. Shortly afterward, Manning tweeted that the engineering team had been notified, and the next day, the purchase worked thanks to an overnight fix. As a customer, I felt like a king, and my previous day's frustration was forgotten. What did we do before the invention of the internet?