At Mediabistro’s Socialize West conference in San Francisco today, Motivity Marketing CEO Kevin Ryan had a simple message for publishers and authors: respond to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers when they write about you.

He shared data from a survey of 1,300 adult Twitter users. The survey focused on a special kind of Twitter user–all the survey respondents said they “frequently tweet” and had used Twitter to complain about something.

The statistics were simple and direct: 83 percent liked or loved getting a response from a company on Twitter. Only four percent of the respondents didn’t like it when a company responded. However, 71 percent of the surveyed Twitter users said they had never been contacted by a company on Twitter.

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