How Social Media Monitoring Can Help Oil and Gas Industry Companies

Oil and gas industry companies not only drive economic growth but have a significant impact on the global economy and energy consumption. This means oil and gas companies can never truly escape public scrutiny. Notorious blunders like environmental disasters, oil spills, and other similar challenges are recorded for everyone to view and amplified across the Internet and social media. Often, the repute and standing of a business are subject to collateral damage when this happens.

Part of the collateral damage is maintaining your corporate reputation. From surface-level data to comprehensive insights into online conversations people are having about your business, one thing’s for sure — oil and gas industry companies have an unstable social reputation. Fluctuating public attitudes toward energy concerns are tied into your visibility in online conversation, making it challenging to perform damage control effectively. Luckily, social media monitoring can help.

Why Oil and Gas Industry Companies Should Implement Social Media Monitoring

Oil and gas industry companies have access to more data and specialized information than ever before. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important for them to analyze what people say on social media about their practices. Thanks to intelligent social media monitoring, businesses can observe social platforms and discussion forums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, enabling them to respond to customer concerns quickly.

From scattered news to direct mentions, replies, and comments, it’s possible to tap into energy industry trends and public sentiment surrounding of them — some of which can have severe business implications. The right social media monitoring tool can make it possible for your company to listen to what the world thinks about your service performance, and that enables you to carry our crisis control in case a disaster happens. That’s because social media monitoring makes it easier to track the constant influx of online news, blogs, mentions, and discussion forums. Leverage these insights to help you enhance your online reputation and power data-driven decision making.

Social Media Monitoring Can Help Your Oil and Gas Company in Several Ways

Negative social media posts are the greatest threat to the reputation of an organization, and 31% of businesses agree. Oil and gas companies need to effectively manage online reputation with the help of social media monitoring tools to ensure that business goes on as usual. These tools also help in the following ways:

Tap into Negative and Positive Sentiment Online

More than ever before, customers want to hear what other online users have to say about your business — does the public think it’s good or bad? Social media monitoring enables businesses to dig deeper into online conversations about their brand and unveil the root cause of negative sentiment that causes damage to their reputation. Identify the causes of discontent with customer sentiment analysis: examine emotions, impressions, and attitudes circling your business and instantly remedy negative sentiments. Public sentiment directly impacts the way the company is positioned and marketed.

Moreover, these tools make it easier to identify online trolls as well as genuine user profiles that tarnish may actively tarnish a business’ reputation.

Pro Tip: Sentiment Analysis is another excellent way to spot where a company’s reputation is in trouble and where it flourishes. Set up keywords that mention the company, industry, competitors, and choose a filter that presents negative mentions first. This way, it becomes possible to identify hurtful comments and remedy them as soon as possible. As for positive reviews, help amplify your brand image by reposting them on all social platforms.

Garner Customer Insight from Online Forums

Although many people take to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to vent their opinions, online consumer forums are also a breeding ground for discussion for users looking to voice out complaints. Businesses can lose almost 22% of their business when prospects encounter a single negative article on when researching that business. Moreover, 75% of companies even go as far as to say that online reviews and forum posts are crucial to maintaining their financial and social reputations.

Thus they serve as a popular channel for public audiences to access detailed information put online by others with similar interests. As such, gas and oil industry companies can leverage these platforms to assess precisely how people perceive your corporation and evaluate your current public image. Moreover, it also becomes likely to harness insights from competitors, keep tabs on the latest news, and stay one step ahead of the opposition at all times. In this way, Mentionlytics can help businesses monitor media coverage: whether it’s social media, online news, blogs, or websites — and capitalize on marketing opportunities instantly.

Learn More about Your Clients

Through customer research conducted on social media, businesses can identify customer trends in the oil and gas industry, while also using the same tools to understand their clients’ preferences as well as dislikes. Additionally, detect information and tendencies that can be deployed in a pitch to win clients over — then prioritize social media platforms, depending on where your business receives the most traction. Social media monitoring tools can help identify what media, forums, and networks are popular within the oil and gas industry.

Identify Potential Causes of Churn

In a highly competitive energy retail market, identifying and understanding the underlying cause of customer turnover is crucial to your success. Social media monitoring empowers businesses as they use a variety of tools to analyze keywords and find conversations about the oil and gas industry. Twitter is often a platform that lets people vent their frustrations publicly — social savvy businesses often tune in to these conversations to figure out grievances and sort them out before they become PR nightmares.

For example, we analyzed results from Twitter to look up the relevant yet straightforward keyword “oil and gas companies”. What we found was a variety of tweets focused on concerns over higher oil prices as well as information on oil and gas companies’ growth assets.

Source: Twitter

Dissect Key Industry Topics

Oil and gas companies must understand industry themes when making business decisions. They can find this info with customer and business surveys that provide comprehensive answers on industry trends. However, it is also a great idea to listen in on social media conversations that provide real-time information a fraction of the cost. That makes it imperative for businesses to take their communications online and use social media to spread messages and amplify campaigns.

Understanding public reception to campaigns and the interest they generate can help companies figure out the ropes of building brand perception online. This can be done by tracking hashtags to monitor industry-related themes on social media, such as #marketnews or #oilexchange — as they are often secondary sources of information for the public.

Source: Twitter

When we looked up #oilexchange, we found detailed conversations such as the one above, where users were actively debating the crude oil situation and its impact on the Nigerian economy. Many similar hashtags also include the voices of core speakers who actively indulge in these conversations and advocate information to the public. As such, identifying core influencers in these discussions can help businesses target communications and determine which stakeholders to include in industry discussions.

Reputation Management and Social Media Flaming

For large conglomerates and multinational corporations, it’s never easy to mitigate local problems, especially when avoidable events turn into a crisis. While all such events can be examples of poor damage control, social media monitoring from the onset of the crises would have helped them. There is no excuse for modern businesses to be ineffective at executing efficient damage control in real-time.

There is no denying the fact that millennials are likely to jump on this mob-mentality bandwagon, and ‘cancel’ businesses after the slightest public backlash. Negative news surrounding a company can severely damage its reputation and leave a lasting impression of users who aren’t always willing to give second chances. With virality detection from Mentionlytics, it’s possible to spot a crisis in the making — and immediately resolve the issue before it’s too late.

Ready To Get Listen In On What People Say About You?

With much of a company’s public image tied to the whims of global internet users, oil and gas companies need to monitor their social reputation actively. Online platforms are growing at a lightning-fast pace, and it’s time to expand your capabilities to tap into online conversations about the business. Who better to tackle this problem with than Mentionlytics?

Mentionlytics is an intelligent social media monitoring platform that helps oil and gas industry businesses analyze trends, to combat negative stories, and create a positive narrative. This platform scrutinizes your data and provides you with relevant, useful insights so you can implement proven strategies to encourage more engagement and gain business. Gain customer insight in real-time and tailor your services to meet their expectations. Get the latest social media monitoring insights in one platform with Mentionlytics. Get in touch with us today for a free trial.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics:
https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-social-media-monitoring-can-help-oil-and-gas-industry-companies