Social Media Monitoring: Catching Fires While They're Sparks

Every viral pile-on starts as a single post. The brands that avoid disasters are the ones watching when it's still one post with twelve likes.

Monitor beyond your mentions: misspellings of your brand, executive names, product names, and the hashtags your industry's critics use.

Triage by trajectory, not size. A complaint gaining shares hour-over-hour deserves attention; a big account's post going nowhere usually doesn't.

Have a response protocol decided in advance — who assesses, who approves, who replies. The worst time to design your process is during the spark.