Your company is not immune to the risk of a crisis. Whether it’s a natural disaster, a product recall, or a comment made by your CEO, crises can happen to any company at any time. And when they do, you need to be prepared to handle the situation quickly and effectively.
One way to do that is to use social media monitoring. By keeping an eye on what’s being said about your company online, you can start addressing any negative sentiment before it spirals out of control.
Here are a few tips for using social media monitoring during a crisis:
1. Set up keyword alerts:
By setting up keyword alerts for your company name, product names, and key executives, you can quickly identify any mention across social media, news, blogs, and forums.
2. Monitor owned social media channels:
In addition to general search engines, you should also be monitoring your owned social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok Facebook. This is where people are likely to go to voice their concerns or share negative experiences. These usually happen in the comments of your branded posts.
3. Pay attention to sentiment:
It’s not just the volume of mentions you should be monitoring but also the sentiment. Are people generally speaking positively or negatively about your company? If you see a spike in negative sentiment, you need to take action quickly.
4. Identify the influential voices:
Who are the people with the most influence on your brand? These are the people whose opinion carries weight with your audience. Keep an eye on what they’re saying about your company, and try to address their concerns directly. It’s okay to reach out directly and request to have a conversation.
5. Respond promptly:
Once you’ve identified a crisis, it’s essential to respond quickly. If you wait too long, you risk the situation getting worse. Be open and transparent. If you made a mistake, own it.
Consider your tone: When you do respond, be sure to consider your tone carefully. You don’t want to come across as defensive or unsympathetic.
What are other benefits there for social media monitoring?
There are several benefits of using social media monitoring. By keeping track of social media, you can learn about and respond to customer sentiment in real-time. Additionally, social media monitoring can help you track competitor activity, identify industry trends, and generate leads.
As already mentioned, another key benefit of social media monitoring is that it can help you protect your reputation. By identifying negative sentiment early on, you can take steps to mitigate any potential damage. Additionally, social media monitoring can help you identify and respond to any false or misleading information about your company, products, and executives.
Overall, social media monitoring provides a wealth of benefits for your brand. It can help you track customer sentiment, competitor activity, industry trends, and generate leads.
What are the challenges of social media monitoring?
There are many challenges when it comes to social media monitoring. One challenge is that there is a lot of noise on social media platforms, making it challenging to find the signal among all the noise. Another challenge is that social media platforms constantly change, making it difficult to keep up with the latest changes and updates. Finally, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook block social monitoring platforms from crawling the site, making it almost impossible to capture the entire social conversation.
Additionally, social media platforms are often used for negative purposes, such as spreading fake news or hate speech. This can make finding accurate and reliable information on social channels complex. Finally, social media monitoring can be a time-consuming and expensive process, mainly if you try to monitor multiple social media platforms at once. Even with all these challenges, investing in monitoring should always be a priority in your B2B social media marketing strategy. It can support defending and promoting the brand online.
What social tools are available?
There are many social media monitoring tools available on the market. Some of these tools are free, but the good ones can get very expensive.
Free social media monitoring tools include Google Alerts, Mention, and Social Mention. A few platforms like Talkwalker give you free searches but limit the data and how far you can look back. Paid social media monitoring tools include Brandwatch, Synthesio, Infegy, and Digimind. These tools are more for enterprise companies with large budgets.
Last thoughts on social media monitoring
It would help if you did not ignore social media monitoring. Doing so will put your brand at significant risk when a crisis arises, and trust me, a crisis will happen. On a positive note, social media monitoring can interject your brand into relevant conversations all over the internet.
