Like many industries, the marketing industry has been feeling the impacts of Covid-19 worldwide. As the crisis unfolds, many marketers are discussing how to keep business moving along in such uncertain times.
While clearly, the main focus continues to be mitigating the disease itself, for many companies brand management and communication on social media is becoming even more strategic.
With most business communication in 2020 already being done digitally, this should leave marketers feeling confident that we have the tools in place to be able to handle such uncertain times. With each new unanticipated twist being thrown your way, your social media management platform provider should have basic Social Media Crisis Management capabilities to help you prepare for any situation that may come your way.
Here are 5 Oktopost features that will help you avoid a crisis on social media:
Campaign Management
Your social audiences are most likely being exposed to new and conflicting information on a daily basis.
For many B2B marketers, large amounts of social content have been created in advance for the 2020 year promoting conferences, events, business trips, summits and meet-ups. With hundreds of pieces of content already created and last-minute updates being made daily, this can be an absolute nightmare to manage when information keeps changing so quickly.
Since each post in lives inside of a campaign, you can rely on Oktopost’s Purge or Pause function in the Campaign Settings to help your team act fast and communicate any changes or updates across your social media networks.
For example, you are hosting a local meet-up and have been waiting to make an announcement as each day new updates are being made regarding the situation. It’s a few days before the event and you decide it will be best to cancel the event altogether.
Since each post is assigned to a specific campaign, you can head over to Campaign Settings to Purge the campaign, meaning you can delete any post that is scheduled into the future. With so much needing to be done last minute, purging the campaign will free your time to focus on other announcements around the cancellation you may need to make.
Same goes for the option to Pause an entire campaign.
Let’s take the above example. As the event date gets closer, your team has decided the meet-up is still important, but under these circumstances, it makes more sense to postpone the event, rather than cancel it altogether. Pausing the campaign will ensure you do not lose any content and when it is time to reschedule the event, all of your thoughtful content will be ready to post at a later time, using Oktopost’s social media scheduling app.
Banned Keywords
Although cliche, we must remember to stay calm and carry on in times of uncertainty.
However, this can be hard to do when the world around you seems to be in complete chaos. With many offices working from home and colleagues practicing social distancing, defining specific keywords that will be banned from being used in posts, replies and throughout social employee advocacy posts will allow you to enforce compliance with your marketing and communication policies and prevent employees from misusing social media.
Social Inbox
Managing inbound messages during a time of crisis can oftentimes be more important than outbound.
Thinking back to the previous example of the meet-up being potentially cancelled or postponed, many participants may be writing in or connecting with you on social media to confirm if the event is still taking place.
You can utilize Oktopost’s Social Inbox to quickly respond to the increase of messaging volume from participants or answer any questions coming your way from your social audience.
Another tactic is to filter your Inbox based on relevant keywords.
For example, perhaps that meet-up had a specific name. You can filter using the event name to find any incoming conversations around that specific event and give attention to those incoming messages, comments, or replies first, before tending to other engagements across social media.
Content Discovery
Today, modern channels of communication like blogs, RSS feeds and websites can give insight and updates regarding current events faster than ever before.
Using the Content Discovery tab, you can quickly plug in keywords or specific publications to help you get updates relevant to your region or even assist in formulating appropriate crisis responses based on your industry.
Crisis Management Module
Now more than ever, we can use this time to make sure our social media crisis management plan is up-to-date in order to prevent any social media crisis from hitting your company, and of course, mitigating the damage to your brand image and customers before something goes wrong.
Looking back at our meet-up example, let’s say you have posted in a few campaigns about your CEO’s event attendance.
Instead of sifting through all of your content and praying to the gods of social media you have found all the posts, you can save your company the embarrassment and press the “Stop” button on all scheduled social media activity across company and employee accounts. This gives you the time you need to strategize next steps, match messaging across channels and re-organize your social media posts to be relevant to the ever-changing events taking place.
During these uncertain circumstances, if you want to learn more about how our Social Media Crisis Management Module can alleviate any fears you may have, feel free to contact us.
To discover more visit: oktopost.com
