Use Social Media Monitoring to Keep Reputational Threats under Control

Social media monitoring is an ongoing process that focuses on getting to know your audience and their perception of your brand. With the help of social media monitoring you are looking for deviations from familiar baseline in your audience’s perception of your brand.

These deviations will generally span across the emotional spectrum from positive to negative — and both extremes require awareness and attention. As such, social media monitoring is done in real-time.

Social Media Monitoring

Looking at the negative side of the spectrum, there are three aspects for social media monitoring you should pay attention to:

Negative Conversations

If customers talk about your brand in a negative way on social media, it’s likely the negative impact won’t be limited to their own perception.

Obviously, you don’t want this type of mentions of your brand on social media. In order to address this kind of issue quickly, you need to use social media monitoring by setting up alerts that notify you of sudden negative sentiment spikes.

In order to stop it from going viral, you set up these alerts using key terms most indicative of negative sentiment. This way, you are never left unprepared. Keep in mind that your social media monitoring tools must accurately analyse sentiment, accounting for sarcasm, jargon or emojis — and all this in real-time. When you look for social media monitoring tool, make sure to take these into account.

Negative Visual Content

Besides offering a platform for discussion, social media is becoming an increasingly visual medium. Users are often sharing images and short videos, hence your social media monitoring should include negative imagery as well.

Data shows that posts including images produce 6 times more engagement than text-only posts. Increased engagement means that any negative visual posts will likely reach a much wider audience. Something as easy as misusing your logo can lead to damage to your brand reputation. Ensure your social media monitoring includes visual content as well.

Reputational Threats

Having alerts is essential in shielding your company from reputational threats, because social media can have a cascading effect on anything that is posted on the platform. Leaving negative mentions unresolved can quickly escalate into a public conflict and going viral will ultimately hamper your activity.

Besides this, there could also be attempts at attacking your brand’s reputation. Targeted attacks will come unexpectedly and can have a devastating short term effect on consumer behaviour. While you can’t completely avoid it, social media monitoring can give you an edge in the process of addressing the issue, by keeping you up-to-date with any negative mentions.