How Covid-19 is impacting social media management

Covid-19 came out of nowhere and impacted every aspect of our lives and livelihood, and indeed threatened our very survival. But we are a resilient species, who have fought back and found ways to adapt and adjust to a new normal – one where we have to co-exist with the virus until a significant majority of the population has immunity against the virus. This resilience and the need to adapt is true for companies and brands, too, in the context of Social Media Management, writes Dr Ranjit Nair, CEO, Germin8.

Also read: How did Prime Minister Narendra Modi handle the Covid-19 pandemic?

The period of lockdowns and gradual unlocking has brought significant changes in the way we work and behave. A significantly higher proportion of our day is spent online for work, education, social connect and entertainment. This is evident by the time spent consuming media online increasing to over four hours since the pandemic in most countries, including India.

The period since the lockdown has also seen an increase in consumers transacting online for their retail, banking, education and entertainment needs. And a lot of these consumers are doing this for the first time, as reflected by the increase in the number of downloads for apps for e-commerce, Net Banking and online education. The increase in usage of these online transactions is likely to continue even after the lockdown restrictions are relaxed because of safe distancing.

With most people working from home, media consumption is now spread out across the day unlike earlier, when it was high during non-office hours. This is likely to continue even after people start working from a physical office again because office timings are likely to be staggered and in many cases where employees will be encouraged to work from home a few days every week.

All of these behavioural changes will have a big impact on how brands use social media. Social media management involves the creation and publishing of content, engaging with consumers and analyses of social media content and engagement.

When it comes to creation of content, besides the obvious changes to the kind of content that brands are able to create because of restrictions imposed by the lockdown, there has been a change to the kind of content brands are choosing to put out on social media. In the early days of the lockdown, brands had been focused on social messages and connecting with their audience with empathy. However, partly because of fatigue and partly because life is beginning to return to normal, social media content too has returned to talking about things other than Covid-19.

There has been close to 30 per cent increase in the amount of time that users are spending on social media and it is more evenly distributed around the day. Thanks to this, brands are now posting more content. Also, instead of focusing mainly on the hours when people are commuting to or from work, brands are publishing content at multiple different times a day.

When it comes to responding to stakeholders on social media, brands have realised that they now have to increase the work timings of their social media response teams. These response teams also have to deal with many more complaints and queries than before because more customers are transacting online than before. Also, many of the customers are first time customers who have teething trouble when it comes to using the brand’s services online.

An area of social media management that has seen big change is online reputation management, where brands have been facing more threats than before. One reason for this is that consumers have much more idle time to rant. Another reason is that there are many slip ups when it comes to how employees practice social distancing, and this gets captured on camera and shared by vigilant customers. Finally, there has been an increase in employee comments in social media that are against the brand’s values which have been coming to light. All of these mean that companies have had to strengthen their online reputation management practices.

Finally, thanks to the increased amount of time being spent by users on social media, there is so much more rich data that is getting generated in terms of conversations as well as relating to content consumption and engagement. With traditional sources of insight like field surveys and face to face interviews drying up, the importance of this kind of social media research and analysis has gone up even further. Specifically related to Covid-19, brands have been using social media listening to understand changes in consumer behavior that impacts purchase behaviour in the physical world as well the virtual world. For instance, FMCG companies have been studying how consumer attitudes towards personal hygiene have changed since the lockdown. Such insights have a huge bearing on the kind of products these companies develop and how they market them.

Just as Covid-19 has touched almost every aspect of our life, so too has it impacted social media management in terms of how to create and publish content, engage with their stakeholders. Brands that adapt to these changes quickly will be the ones that thrive while those that don’t will struggle.