The majority of businesses and brands are ignoring their customers in social media.

Recent surveys have shown that posts about customer service issues on Twitter and Facebook are often met with no response at all. Silence.

To your customers, that silence speaks volumes. Here’s what it tells them: 1) That you’re not listening 2) That their questions or problems aren’t very important 3) That you’re more interested in pumping out marketing messages in social media than actually helping your customers with their needs.

In actual fact, your reasons for not responding may stem from some very real internal business challenges around social customer care, such as identifying and training the right employees to engage with customers, scaling operations and resources to keep up with the rising number of posts, prioritizing messages that are truly actionable, and developing meaningful metrics that track the results of your social efforts against business goals.

But these justifications are mere background noise for your customers, who just want –and expect — their questions acknowledged and their problems solved. As Dave has blogged here in the past, “responding to customer posts … is now table stakes.”

Sometimes, the disparate priorities between the marketing and customer service departments can slow down or kill your response times, too. But put yourself in the shoes of the customer whose question to your brand’s Facebook Wall goes unanswered for days, even as new status updates about upcoming sales and special events continue to appear. No amount of explaining that “marketing controls the Facebook page, and only handles outbound postings” will satisfy.

With 2012 now in full swing, there’s no better time for the members of your social team — no matter where they sit in the organization — to come together and build out a workflow that ensures your fans, customers, and advocates are listened to, and then actually answered when they reach out to you with a problem.