Needless to say, social and digital media conquered a very huge part of our lives. Millions of users are producing billions of tweets and posts on different social media platforms. Citizen journalism became an essential source of information not only for regular people but entities such as media agencies and networks.
Throughout Crowd Analyzer’s endless research and monitoring, we noticed that governmental entities are not yet setting a foot in social media, at least not as they should. Check out our article about ministries of health in the Gulf region!
Here are some points that should urge governments to form a well-structured social media strategy that involves the social litening and intelligence.
A “Send” button is more reachable and effective than a “Dial” button
Social media platforms tend to replace real-world factors such as word of mouth and filing complaints. Companies and firms from different sectors submitted to this fact and are now handling social media with full power just as they handle customer service for instance.
When people need a recommendation, they post their questions on their social media profiles. When they want to complain about a product or a service, they do the same thing and mention the concerned company or authority. Governmental bodies should have an effective presence on different social media platforms in a way that makes people comfortable to address and raise issues to them. On the other hand, governmental social accounts should also be very interactive and form a strategy to handle social media in a diplomatic, yet efficient, way.
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism surely boomed all of a sudden with more users reporting events and news on their own profiles to the extent that their reporting’s accuracy may be higher and more timely than classic news agencies.
Citizen journalism in the Middle East and the whole world urged all sectors to adopt social media listening as a main discipline in their companies and firms. Since there is so much content generated daily online, companies are finding it hard to neglect such an important source of information.
Social media listening is the key
Social media listening allows governmental entities to keep a close eye on happenings across the country, region, and world. Well, to be very specific, these are ways for departments of the government can utilize social media:
- Closely monitoring crises
Since social media listening is based on gathering data that matches a specific query with selected keywords, entities may be even more specific and select keywords that indicate danger to raise a red flag and send notifications and emails to those who have the authority to react.
A certain behavior can also raise a red flag, for example, if certain social accounts (for example, an influencer) tweets more than 5 times a day, given that his regular count is 3, a red flag will also be raised and an email will be sent out.
- Quick response to inquiries
Many people complain about issues they’re facing or ask about a procedure they need to do. These inquiries that citizens use social media to ask are essential matters that may affect their lives drastically.
We know that many governments took a step to integrate with social media, but there’s always one added value to monitoring and responding quickly. Honestly, the most successful firms in private and public sectors allocate a team to handle social media listening and reply to people who post on social media. Ministries can definitely do the same to get more people to interact with them, publish announcements as quickly as possible, and reach out to more people. The best method to achieve the best results in interactions is through:
- Closely monitoring what people are saying.
- Closely monitoring competitors and counterparts.
- Observe the engagement of audience with similar entities.
- Experiment with different types of content.
- Measuring negative content
Governments are a hot topic for rumors and scam. Since it’s almost impossible to monitor all content manually, governmental bodies have to invest into gathering and analyzing data from all over social media platforms to make sure they get accurate insights about the negative and positive content they’re mentioned in. Sentiment analysis of online content definitely helps a lot, especially if accompanied with access to raw data. Crowd Analyzer gladly offers these features amongst many others in Arabic and English. Request a demo to know more about our platform.
