With the ability to go international in just one hour and damage a brand’s reputation forever, a full-blown social media crisis is many a PR or communication professional’s worst nightmare. Social listening provides insights that could save your brand from lasting damage, and with its real time characteristics, Twitter data can be particularly valuable.

Here are some of our top tips for using media monitoring effectively to prevent and manage social media crises.

Reliable Twitter data monitoring is critical

Most crises break on social media, but why favor Twitter over other social media sites?

For a start, Twitter is an information hub: even if a story doesn’t break on Twitter, it will pass through at some point. Tweets sharing photos, videos, or linking to blog posts, press articles, or other sites such as Youtube or Periscope mean that Twitter brings together a vast quantity of content from across the web. As a result, Twitter is ideal for ensuring that you pick up anything that is being said about your brand or industry, wherever the information is coming from.

Secondly, Twitter is a paradise for expressing negative views. The 140-character format of a tweet can be posted quickly and easily from any device, ideal for heat-of-the-moment comments. With the right hashtag or mention, a damaging post can be viewed by completely unrelated accounts.

Lastly, Twitter is a preferred medium for influencers such as celebrities, journalists and bloggers to interact with their fans. The site’s follower/followed dynamic means that tweets from these users can be seen and retweeted by huge audiences instantly.

With all of the information that it puts at your fingertips, it’s small wonder that Twitter data is now key to both preventing crises and monitoring their progression.

Preventing a crisis

Where a PR crisis is concerned, prevention is better than cure, and monitoring your brand on Twitter can give you the insights that will allow you to spot a looming crisis and nip it in the bud.

So where should you start to look?

Focus on keywords

Twitter listening is very flexible and can adapt to the needs of your particular brand. You can choose to monitor tweets containing your company name or Twitter handle, about your industry in general, or about your competitors.

Monitoring high-risk keywords is also a good idea. Try to identify keywords that are sensitive to your brand: Has one of your product’s key ingredients fallen into disrepute? The recent scandal around palm oil being one of the main ingredients of Nutella is a good example of how to choose the keywords to link to your brand.

Focus on people

Knowing who the key influencers in your industry are is essential. Bloggers, vloggers, journalists, industry experts, politicians, activists…all have the power to start a social media storm around your brand, so pay attention to what they are tweeting about. Create lists of people to monitor and be prepared to respond immediately to any negative tweets.

Focus on topics

A good Twitter monitoring system will allow you to look at tweet content as well as number-based statistics. Having access to tweet content will give you an idea of what the majority of users are tweeting about your brand and whether the overall tone is positive or negative.

However, tweet content can also be vital for picking up weak signals: small echoes that would ordinarily be drowned out by the general noise around your brand. Weak signals are often a preliminary warning sign of a looming crisis and need to be kept under strict observation in case they start to escalate.

Use alerts to avoid unpleasant surprises

Unfortunately, crises rarely break during office hours. It’s a good idea to set up alerts to make sure that you’re always the first to know, whenever the trouble may start. Customize your alerts to suit your needs: when the number of incoming tweets goes over a certain threshold, when a certain high-risk keyword is used, or when a top influencer tweets about your brand.

Set your alerts to be sent to an email account, or a professional communication platform such as Slack, so that you can access them outside of the office.

Being aware of your brand’s reputation in real time is key to good crisis management. A proactive approach allows you to respond immediately to negative comments, diminishing the chance of them developing into a full-blown crisis.

Managing a crisis

It’s no secret: if your brand is hit by a social media crisis, time is of the essence. It’s all too easy to get lost in the sea of incoming posts, press articles, blog posts and other information. Twitter monitoring can help you to manage your time and resources, making sure you say the right thing at the right time, and to the right people. Here are a few things your Twitter monitoring tool can do to help you prioritize and ride out the storm.

Focus on hashtags

As dedicated hashtags are often created by users, monitor the most common hashtags being used in tweets about your crisis to ensure that you’re not missing out on a vital way of reaching your target audience. For example, during the recent issues Amazon experienced with its Amazon Prime Day event, the #PrimeDayFail hashtag was used by unhappy customers to tweet about their disappointment.

If a dedicated hashtag is being used, make sure that you use it in all of your responses so that it gets seen by as wide an audience as possible.

Focus on influencers

Use your monitoring tool to determine which users are fanning the flames of the crisis and doing the most damage. Although you won’t always be able to respond to them, identifying them (and who they are being retweeted by) will help to keep track of the spread of the crisis.

Similarly, you can use the data to identify any users defending your brand, and where possible, request their help with dispelling rumors by speaking in your favor.

Twitter monitoring will also allow you to pick up any tweets sent by major press accounts linking to external articles, allowing you to react and send press releases as quickly as possible to avoid speculation.

Focus on most-retweeted posts

Keep an eye on incoming tweets, and evaluate whether there are valid questions or misconceptions that need to be responded to. Are there any particular subjects that need to be addressed?

During the recent scandal surrounding UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, captured Twitter data revealed that time and time again, doctors had tweeted about the fact that they felt they had been called lazy. Although the crisis was already well under way, a well-timed, well-placed apology or explanation could have helped to calm the situation.

Make sure you pay attention to the language and terms used in the tweets’ content, and adjust your responses accordingly for maximum impact.

Monitor your success

As things progress, use your monitoring tool to check how users are responding to your strategy: are your messages being retweeted? Are your responses being covered by the press?

If you aren’t getting the result you’re looking for, the data may help you to determine why, so that you can adjust your strategy to compensate.

Learn from your experience

The insights you can get from in-depth Twitter analytics are vital to learning from a crisis and avoiding similar cases in the future. Before you move on to something else, make sure that you’ve identified:

The origin of the crisis: Because Twitter activity unfurls in real time, a Twitter monitoring tool should allow you to identify the exact moment the crisis started and who started it.

Sensitive subjects to monitor for the future: If one particular topic was at the core of your crisis, be sure to earmark it for future monitoring. Choose your keywords and hashtags carefully to make sure you get in-depth coverage.

Key users: Use your captured data to determine who the top influencers behind the crisis were. Keep a close eye on them, as they may be crucial to saving your brand from similar problems in the future.

Adapt your crisis management protocol: If you didn’t have a pre-defined crisis management strategy set up before the event, take the opportunity to do so now. Making sure that your teams know exactly what to do in the event of a social media crisis is crucial to save time…and your company’s reputation.

If you did already have a protocol, use your newly acquired data to rethink it where necessary and refine any processes that didn’t work for you this time around.

---

Twitter brings together huge quantities of information from across the web in real time, and has become a vital resource for managing your brand’s reputation.

The data that you can obtain by monitoring your brand on Twitter is crucial to anticipating or even preventing, managing and learning from brand crises.

But to do it, you need the right tool. Visibrain is a reliable, real time and in-depth Twitter monitoring platform. Its unique Focus feature allows you to customize your searches in just a few clicks, for incredibly accurate monitoring.

Want to find out what Twitter monitoring can do for you? Get in touch with Visibrain for a free trial of the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform.

---

Subscribe to the newsletter

Stay up to date and subscribe to our newsletter and receive media monitoring best practices, social data trends & exclusive case studies: