Social media is an enormously powerful tool for managing customer relationships, broadcasting positive brand stories and introducing new products. But while the benefits of this free, fast and intuitive marketing channel are virtually limitless, it also has some potentially serious risks.

But there’s good news; with proper planning you can avoid the most common mistakes that lead to a social media crisis.

What Causes Social Media Crises?

Common Mistakes — Just about anything can spark social media outrage and bring out the trolls, but the most common slip-ups include:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes made by professional organizations
• Accidentally liking an inappropriate post
• Tweeting a personal message from a professional account
• Unintentionally making an offensive statement

Serious Problems — Employee sabotage and hacking are much more serious offenses. While businesses can, and do, shift responsibility for the malicious post, they’re often criticised for allowing their login credentials to be compromised.

Catastrophic Events — Intentionally racist, sexist, or malicious comments made by companies or individuals ignite the worst type of social media crisis. These statements can significantly impact a brand’s revenue and reputation, and recovery could take years.

Look no further than Roseanne Barr for a trending example of how powerful one tweet can be.

In the days following her comment, Barr’s television contract was canceled, her reputation was heavily damaged, and she lost an estimated $3 million in revenue.

So, how can you avoid a social media crisis? Here are 6 steps you can take.

1. Have a Crisis Communication Plan

The most important steps toward preventing a social media disaster are understanding what crisis management means for your business and creating an action plan to address your risk factors.

While you can’t predict every crisis, you can train your social media team to prepare for, and effectively manage, potential problems.

Since social media is your front line of communication during a crisis, your plan should include specific guidelines to protect your brand. Most importantly, always have a second set of eyes on every post before it’s published. Companies should also train more individuals in crisis communications and social media management than you think you’ll need.

2. Monitor your Social Media for Trouble!

Identifying problems as soon as they arise is critical to crisis prevention. Unfortunately, you may never know about the biggest issues facing your company because 96% of angry customers don’t complain to brands directly. Many of these upset customers prefer posting about their poor experience on their own timeline. These “dark” complaints could go unnoticed, causing negative impact, without proper tools and training.

Social listening tools allow you to monitor keywords and indirect brand mentions as well as direct mentions. This gives your company a much more holistic view of what your customers are saying across all social platforms.

Keyhole’s Intelligent Notifications feature is an excellent example of how brands can set up alerts to detect direct and indirect (‘dark’) posts with negative sentiment.

Keyhole AI detects any tracked posts with negative sentiment made about your brand, and you automatically receive an Intelligent notification in your inbox, which allows you to react to the post before the negative sentiment escalates.

For instance, United Airlines would have seen this tweet and its volume, the first mention of the United Flight 3411 incident, with Keyhole.

This would have given the airline an ample runway to handle the crisis before it escalated.

3. Always Engage with Your Audience

Social profiles are frequently viewed as sales tools instead of powerful customer service platforms for building brand loyalty and customer care. By solely pitching products rather than having meaningful conversations with your followers, you could miss opportunities to address customer experience problems early on.

According to Maritz Research, 49% of customers expect companies to respond to Twitter complaints, yet only 29% of those who complained received a reply.

Additionally, customers who complain expect a response within 4 hours, while the average brand response time exceeds 10 hours.

It’s crucial to respond quickly and professionally when negative comments about your company are discovered. Ignoring criticism, even when it isn’t posted directly to your page, sends a message to your followers that you don’t care enough about them to respond.

4. Respond to Criticism Professionally

Knowing how to properly handle criticism in a public forum is essential to protecting your reputation. A single rude response to a genuine complaint will do far more damage to your image than the original comment could.

Deleting comments and blocking users may seem like the quickest way to fix a problem, but doing so could cause your customer to become more outspoken. Instead, make an effort to understand what caused the situation and show a willingness to make things right.

Consumers typically complain on social media when their problem has not been properly resolved. You may be able to prevent your customers from complaining in public by providing a seamless resolution process on your website or over the phone.

Angry customers want to express their frustration quickly, so they usually avoid email. Adding a simple feedback button to your site may prevent them from firing off a raging tweet for all to see. Just make sure it’s easy to find and effortless to use. You could even offer visitors incentives for leaving feedback if it they’ve been poking around your site for a while.

5. Choose the Right Person to Manage Your Accounts

Assigning your brand’s social media strategy to an intern or an inexperienced employee may save you money, but it could also be a recipe for disaster.

A great social media manager has a level head, is capable of handling a crisis, and is well-organized and detail-oriented. Finding someone with public relations experience adds another layer of insurance against mistakes.

Prefer to outsource the work? There are many companies specializing in managing social media accounts for businesses. This option may be the most impactful if you have room in your budget.

6. Draft an Employee Social Media Policy

Most people might think their private social profiles are safe for ranting about work stress, but negative posts can have serious consequences if customers or coworkers see them. Distribute guidelines about how to reference your brand online, but don’t scare your team away from posting. Happy employees are some of the best recruiting tools you can ask for!

Closing thoughts

The benefits of using social media intelligently will always outweigh the risks. Remember to monitor for problems, listen to your followers, react quickly and compassionately, and plan ahead, that way you’ll be able to maximize the benefits of this channel while avoiding potential crises.

Website getting traffic but still not getting conversions?

If you think your content’s fine, then perhaps you need to take a look at your keyword strategy?

Yes, you sometimes need to go all the way back to make sure you’re drawing in quality leads from the right channels.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most brilliant and engaging pieces of content in the world. If you targeted the wrong keywords, none of your PPC, SEO, or content marketing strategies will consistently produce profitable results.

The good news is, keyword research doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely difficult. With the right tools and tactics, you can definitely discover lucrative keyword opportunities without breaking a sweat.

In this post, we’ll show you the best ways to do keyword research so you can bag winning keyword suggestions every single time.

Let’s get started.

1. Turn Seed Keywords Into Long-Tail Keywords

Regardless of niche, keyword research always starts with a seed keyword that’s too broad and competitive to be feasible.

That’s why you need tools like Ubersuggest to expand your seed keyword into hundreds of long-tail keyword ideas. These are keywords that are at least 3 terms long and target a narrower audience.

To use Ubersuggest, simply enter your seed keyword and click “Look Up.” Don’t forget to adjust the localization of your keyword to generate suggestions that are relevant to your place of business.

Within seconds, Ubersuggest will generate hundreds of long-tail keywords as well as present the metrics that can determine their profitability.

To keep things short, here is a brief explanation of each of the three metrics you’ll encounter in Ubersuggest results:

Search Volume
The first metric measures the average monthly searches. This can be directly used to gauge a keyword’s popularity and demand.

CPC
Short for cost per click, the CPC metric denotes the average amount that advertisers are willing to pay for PPC advertisement actions. A high CPC often signals that a particular keyword can be monetized and converts well.

Competition
Lastly, Ubersuggest measures the competitiveness level of keywords on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. For faster results, it’s recommended that you target keywords with a competitiveness score of around 0.4 or less.

At this point, you should be able to come up with a fresh lineup of long-tail keywords (whether for PPC or SEO) based on the initial results.

But don’t get overexcited — there’s still much work to be done to make sure your keywords lead to conversions.

2. Pluck Out Commercial or Transactional Keywords

A rule of thumb when doing keyword research is to find the balance between search volume and competitiveness.

Of course, you don’t want to target keywords with barely any demand at all. You shouldn’t go with the flow and pick up a keyword that everyone else uses, either.

What you want are long-tail keywords that pertain to a user’s desire to take action.

You can do this by injecting commercial or transactional terms into your Ubersuggest keyword suggestions. Just enter terms like “buy,” “price,” “service,” “shop,” or whatever term makes sense for your seed keyword in the “Filter Results” field.

After applying your filters, Ubersuggest will then refine and drastically reduce the number of keyword suggestions. This makes it much easier for you to spot profitable keyword opportunities:

3. Track Trending Keywords on Social Media

If you’re trying to build traffic through social media, then you’ll need a slightly different approach when doing keyword research.

The main issue is that social media networks use internal search engines that don’t use the same keywords as web platforms like Google. As such, you need to use a keyword tracking tool that’s specifically tailored to social media networks.

Keyhole is, without a doubt, an excellent tool for this job. It allows you to find and monitor trending keywords as well as hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram — two of the biggest social media networks in terms of user engagement.

Just like Ubersuggest, you can start using Keyhole by entering a seed keyword. This time, however, you need to specify if you want to track a hashtag, keyword, URL, social media account, or brand mention.

To fine-tune your keyword tracker, click “Advanced” to reveal the filters you can use to refine results. For example, if you want to ignore posts from a direct competitor, click on “Ignore posts” and fill in the rest of the details.

Let’s say you want to track the keywords “WordPress,” “web design,” and “blogging.”

After the initial data is produced, you should be able to see pertinent information, such as the number of posts with your keywords, their collective reach, and even the overall sentiment of users.

Before you save your tracker, don’t forget to specify how you want to receive alerts. This will enable you to be always in tune with social media users when it comes to your target keywords.

Remember that tracking keywords on social media can improve conversions in two ways.

Apart from letting you gauge the demand for a keyword, it will also give you opportunities to initiate and close conversions yourself whenever your brand or product gets mentioned. For this, simply, track your brand name or social media handles via Keyhole.

4. Get Suggestions from the Keyword Cloud

Once your Keyhole tracker is up and running, it’s time to snag yourself some keyword ideas.

From the main dashboard, navigate to “My Trackers” and select the tracker you want to work with.

This will pull up real-time data based on the tracking options you’ve set earlier.

Now, to locate new keyword opportunities, scroll down to the “Related Topics” section to view the hashtag and keyword clouds. Here, you can visually observe the popularity of keywords that are related to your seed keyword:

How can social media keywords boost your conversions?

Good question.

Remember that most if not all online users only transact with brands they trust.

By participating in conversations and offering your expertise to social media users, you slowly build your brand’s authority in your niche. Of course, researching hashtags will also allow you to extend the social reach of your content whenever you share something.

To learn more how to leverage social media networks to win your audience’s trust, you can refer to more guides here.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a fundamental piece of online marketing that marketers love to overlook.

Hopefully, the guide above put keyword research in a new light. It’s not necessarily the most difficult aspect of online marketing, but it can have the biggest impact when it comes to the visibility of overall profitability of your website.

Do you have other suggestions on how marketers should perform keyword research? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Of the 7.5 billion people in the world, 3.03 billion of them are active social media users.

Your customers are, obviously, among these users and they have conversations on social platforms every day. This creates an opportunity for you to listen to what they are saying and learn more about them.

And that’s basically what social listening is — monitoring what customers are saying on social.

But it wouldn’t make sense to just listen to what people are saying about you or your industry. If you’re a good listener, you are learning, and if you’re a good student, you apply what you know.

Koka Sexton of Slack once shared his journey with social media, where he explained how he sees social media as not just a platform to interact with people, but to build a pipeline of relevant customers to grow businesses.

I came across this idea of social networks. (…) At that point, the idea of leveraging social networks as a sales person was basically unheard of. My focus was optimizing that behavior. (…) I had the goal of building my pipeline and not building a brand or building a fan base.

It’s not enough to listen or even watch your fan base grow, you need to use what you’re listening to to grow your business.

What you need is a toolbox of the social listening strategies that can help you benefit from monitoring social interactions. How do you make the most of the conversations that happen about your brand and industry on social media?

Here are five social listening strategies to grow your business faster in 2018.

1. Send bottom-of-the-funnel customers to gated free trials, product pages or waiting lists

Like top-of-the-funnel buyers, bottom-of-the-funnel consumers are also always lurking around conversations about your industry, brand, or specific product.

These people have heard about your brand before.

And they’re ready to buy. They just need a few questions answered.

So they ask questions like “Is there a version that will include xyz feature coming soon?” OR “Can your product do this specific thing?” If you’re keeping tabs on conversations in your industry, you’ll be able to pull these prospects into the fold.

In 2017, top car brand Audi had a tweet where a prospective Audi buyer (Godwin) asked if they had any new upgrades on a couple of their cars.

Audi responded saying the feature is coming in 2018, and sent the buyer a link where he could sign up with them to get updated once it’s out.

Once the buyer clicks the link, Audi sends him to a well-designed landing page where he’s being welcomed as a lead. The car brand gets his info and gets the chance to alert him once his desired feature is out in the market.

This is one of the best social listening strategies I’ve seen anywhere.

And there’s one beautiful but quite hidden advantage here: 67% of Americans say they get at least some of their news on social media.

This means while Audi is responding to Godwin with a signup form to fill, there are probably other potential buyers around who have the same question Godwin asked and would sign up to get updates from Audi as well — via the same page Audi sent to Godwin.

This way, Audi is using social listening as a tactic to generate more leads for their new car upgrade coming in 2018.

Another example: Aaron Lee, Regional Manager at Agorapulse, recently tweeted that he was looking for a good web host for a new site. New web host provider, ChemiCloud, took the stage and introduced Aaron to their new hosting platform.

Image of Chemicloud Hosting tweeting to Aaron

It’s a powerful social listening strategy to monitor these industry interactions and earn the opportunity to convert bottom-of-the-funnel prospects into actual paying buyers.

And if, like Audi, you don’t already have the feature or exact product a potential buyer is asking for, have a well-designed page ready to convert the person into a lead — so you have the opportunity to draw them back to your business when it’s time.

2. Refer top-of-the-funnel customers to ungated content (or any other value)

In social conversations in your industry, top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) customers are also always lurking around.

There’s always someone hearing about your brand or product for the first time or just seeing conversations about your brand or industry. Unlike the customers represented in my #1 strategy above, these people aren’t ready to buy anything; they only want to learn more about the matter being discussed — your product, brand or industry.

You can refer these customers to a piece of content, a handy tool, or any value that answers their questions and get them ready to buy.

Should you gate content (or any value at all) for TOFU customers?

Audi, in the example above, sent ready-to-buy prospects right from social interactions to a gated page; should you do the same for top-of-the-funnel customers? Not quite.

Picture this for a moment: you go to Twitter and find a promoted tweet that interests you. The tweet is from a brand you’ve never seen or heard of before, promoting a product you don’t entirely understand. So you’re curious. You want to learn more about about what’s being promoted. You reply the tweet asking “How do I get started?”

To which the brand replies, “Go to [this url] to learn how to get started.”

Would you click or not? You probably would. After all, you’re the one looking for answers.

But on getting to the page, you find a form asking for your personal information. Would you give your information just to learn more about a product? You probably won’t. Especially when you’re just trying to see how to get started with a product.

If you were ready to get started, that’s a different case, you’d sign up. But gating a page that’ll teach you how to get started? Not ideal.

Landing page leader Instapage puts it this way:

“During the awareness stage, most prospects know very little about your brand and have yet to trust you. Removing the gate from content in this stage can improve your brand’s visibility and enhance your credibility with prospects. As prospects move down the marketing funnel and are more interested in your business, they will be more likely to be willing to fill out a form in order to gain access to content like ebooks and webinars.”

So it’s best to make your tool, content or any other value ungated for TOFU people who just want to “learn more”.

You’ll also notice in the example above that Audi included a link in their tweet for top-of-the-funnel buyers to get more information about their available product (car).

Image of Audi Tweeting their new A8 and linking to a signup

The link takes TOFU prospects to a page that provides them with useful and intriguing information about the car. They learn about the different features of the car, like its new automated driving feature and interaction intelligence.

Remember, these are top-of-the-funnel customers from Audi’s social listening efforts. The car brand could have just tweeted and let it end there. But no, they squeezed more juice from their social listening and moved interested buyers further in their purchase journeys.

3. Turn negative feedback into opportunities

Here comes the horrible bit of social listening.

If you weren’t paying attention to what’s being said about your brand on social media, you’d be safe — like a turtle with its head in the sand. But if you’re listening, you would have to come across people who are not so pleased with your brand or product — AKA unhappy customers.

The study I cited earlier says 67% of Americans get news from social media. You can imagine how many people are watching when unhappy customers say things like these:

Image of Keyhole’s Sentiment page
Want to listen to your brand social interactions this way? Try Keyhole.

But what you do after getting bad reviews is what matters the most.

Social media expert Kim Garst advises that…

While you don’t have direct control over the reviews people leave, there are two ways you can indirectly improve them:(1) Listen to negative feedback and use it to improve your business, and (2) Encourage satisfied customers or clients to leave reviews. This will dilute the impact of any negative reviews you receive.

Much of the damage from negative feedbacks is salvageable. And, working with complaints can be an opportunity to prove you really care about customers. Since these conversations happen on social media, everyone gets to see how you handle critics — especially when you handle them timely.

Author of the bestselling book The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, Tamar Weinberg, mirrors the same idea about handling critics with finesse and timeliness:

For social customer experience, it’s important to speak to users where they are and when they need you. It’s not just about Facebook and Twitter complaints. It’s about complaints that arise anywhere, including your own website.

However, it can be overwhelming to take note of every single piece of negative feedback, but the trick is to find the public embarrassments your company can do something about and handle the situation with finesse and style that impresses onlookers.

For example, JetBlue got a tweet from a customer who was complaining about being on a flight that had a bad headphone jack and a malfunctioning TV.

JetBlue responded with what clearly looks like more than just an apology; they offered to compensate the customer with a $15 credit for the inconvenience (once she can confirm she’s the actual customer who had the experience).

Image of JetBlue’s reply

Again, the beautiful thing about this is that everybody is watching. CrazyEgg cofounder Hiten Shah puts it this way — “We all should remember the social in social media. Otherwise it would just be media. Social media on the whole is all about people.”

Enough said about negative feedback. What do you do with the positive news?

4. Retweet or repost positive feedback

When monitoring your social analytics, you’ll come across encouraging and energizing feedback about your brand or product. What do you do with that kind of tangible evidence? Just be glad you got a good note? No, repost them (or retweet if it’s Twitter). That’s one of the most effective social listening strategies you can utilize.

Retweeting or reposting your customers’ positive feedback is a great strategy because it reminds your followers of the awesomeness of what you’re selling, and it will likely interest new leads who happen to hear others raving about you. And customer content, like reviews and positive feedback, yields as much as a 133% higher conversion rate.

Money saving app Piggybank does a great job at this. They repost the positive reviews they get from Twitter right on their Instagram page.

And since consumers resonate more easily with reviews from fellow consumers than from ads sent out by brands, Piggybank’s happy customers see fit to testify to the customer review Piggybank posted…

And there are also bottom-of-the-funnel customers asking how to get started; here’s one:

That said, you can’t possibly repost every single positive feedback — especially if you’re a huge business where your comments pile up in the hundreds and thousands.

But use the great ones. Using this as one of your core social listening strategies can put you on the good side of your customers and lead new folks into your funnel.

5. Use a social monitoring tool (with the right features)

After all’s said and done, one thing that can make or break your social listening strategy is your social listening or monitoring tool. It’s the single tool that your entire social listening strategy will be built on. Heck, there’s hardly any campaign you’ll run today successful without using some marketing technology.

A great social monitoring tool will:

• Analyze the most engaging posts about your brand so you can leverage them.
• Alert you when an influencer talks about you so you can leverage that too.
• Tell you once a keyword or topic you’re tracking is being talked about on social.
• Will have all these functionalities in one platform.

There are several tools out there. We recommend Keyhole. Are we biased because that’s our tool? Well, don’t take our word for it.

Renowned marketing guru Neil Patel says: “You don’t want to be the one that comes in late to the party after everyone’s already left and moved on to the next big thing. You’ll want to contribute when the topic is still hot so you can be a thought leader on the subject. You can easily accomplish that with a tool called Keyhole. This tool isn’t free, but it does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly. Can you guess how to get started? That’s right, sign up for (a free trial) account.”

Conclusion

Conversations will always go on in your industry, and when they do, you want to join in and take advantage of the chatter.

Whether people are holding conversations directly about your brand, your industry, or your competitors, information is passing between people at high speed. You simply have to keep listening and monitoring.

The social listening strategies above reap your company lots and lots of benefits. Be proactive and take advantage of the tools out there to be a good listener. Take notice and look lively. Your business will be one of the best because you did.