Social Media Monitoring Best Practices for Governments
Historically, the objective of government media monitoring and analysis has been to determine who is saying what, where, and which key messages have the greatest impact on public opinion.
Nowadays, governments have turned to social media platforms to gather insight into the general public’s mood and measure public opinion.
More importantly, governments need to become a part of the public conversation rather than simply being the topic of conversation or being on the sidelines.
Monitoring social media channels help governments achieve both short-term and long-term objectives such as:
- Prioritizing issues to manage and address
- Managing their reputation by early detecting negative sentiments and stopping it from spreading.
- Ongoing enhancement of public services provided
… and much more.
Tracking numerous topics and mentions across diverse sources becomes a challenge for government agencies. As they must be attentive to public opinion not only on a local level, but also on a global level, and obtain a comprehensive understanding of how they are portrayed in media outlets around the world.
That is why governments are increasingly adopting social media monitoring and listening tools as a critical aspect of their PR and communications strategies.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the practice of listening to millions of online conversations to determine what is being said about a specific issue, election, political or economic situation, brand, person, or product, as well as to identify opportunities. This is how we monitor the Internet, bysearching for mentions of your brand, campaigns, or actions, and listening to people to determine their interests
Social media monitoring encompasses the entire web, including social networks, forums, blogs, news sites, communities, and anywhere else on the web where conversations occur.
Social Media Monitoring Best Practices for Governments
Conducting Sentiment Analysis
In a sense, the Internet involves people exposing their true emotions or feelings for others to see, which they may not do in real life.
The use of AI-powered sentiment analysis can help public sector organizations better comprehend the solvable problems of their constituents.
AI powered sentiment analysis can help governments (1) extract crucial information from incoherent statements, (2) categorize the information issues based on relevance (i.e. each issue can be categorized to be addressed by the relevant public sector institution) and finally (3) mine social channels for any real-time complaints or public issues that require attention.
Powerful all-in-one tools such as Fileworx help government officials capture, analyze, and take action in real-time; leading to desired outcomes such as:
- Reducing corruption
- Increasing transparency
- Developing relevant public services
- Discussing relevant public policies
- Reducing bureaucratic processes
- Detecting suspicious or harmful behaviors
- Measuring the opinion of the general public in hot topics or relevant public issues
Enhanced Engagement through Account Monitoring and Tracking
Another important factor for government organizations is monitoring the public activity of “influencers” on social media channels in real-time.
An influencer is a person who has the ability to sway the decisions of their followers due to their relationship with their audience and their knowledge and expertise in a specific field, such as fashion, travel, or technology. Influencers typically have a large number of devoted followers who pay close attention to their opinions.
The ideal social media monitoring tool will enable government officials and institutions to identify the relevant social accounts to follow and proactively engage with. As “thought leaders” with massive influence on the opinion of their communities – it is a wise strategy to engage those influencers as representatives of the population.
Faster Decisions through Real-time Reporting
Whether the reputation for inefficient service is warranted or not – almost all government institutions suffer from that public image.
However, the ideal strategy to counter this image is to impress the public with faster and more relevant responses. This is achievable when you have the right insight into the problems and issues you need to address.
Fileworx helps you gain such insight through customized and automated reports. Such reports include:
- Statistical reports
- Trend reports
- Geographical distribution reports
… and much more.
The analyst can get a clean, crisp, and fully custom dashboard of insights that include monitored hashtags, tweets, posts, domains, URLs, and social media accounts.
Why do government institutions prefer Fileworx?
Besides enabling government officials to implement the aforementioned social media monitoring best practices, Fileworx also:
- Provides the necessary information to decision makers smoothly and instantly
- Utilizes state-of-the-art AI technologies like speech recognition and content categorization to structure the captured data
- Enhances the overall organization’s efficiency by automating the workflow and content delivery mechanisms
- Contains a central repository to archive all your data
Implementing social media monitoring best practices
From powerful real-time search capabilities to influencer engagement; Fileworx helps public service providers and governments achieve desired results by packaging all the best practices and core features needed in one platform that enables cross-functional team members and multiple users collaborate in a streamlined and secure manner.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today for a free demo.
