In the first blog of our series that uses Home Depot as a guide for how brands can utilize NewsWhip Spike, we demonstrated how to monitor earned media about your brand in real time. We explained the importance of monitoring conversations online, and now we’ll dive deeper into NewsWhip’s public engagement prediction feature, revealing how you can identify a potential crisis or spot a brand opportunity.
Predict the potential impact of every article
As soon as an article is discovered (which happens in as little as 60 seconds) the engagement it’s receiving is measured at regular intervals from the time of discovery. This surfaces the stories that are quickly gaining public engagement, and helps teams determine how their brand might be impacted, be it positive or negative. What does this look like in Spike?
In the dashboard we made for Home Depot, the prediction element can be accessed for web articles as well as Facebook posts. In this view, you can see an article or post’s current engagement, and what it’s predicted to reach up to 24 hours in the future. Real-time prediction helps you stay ahead of every developing story, and this could have proved beneficial when a story about a homeless Home Depot employee made headlines.
The employee first made waves through a viral TikTok where she explained how she sleeps in her car and showers at a Planet Fitness. An article from Daily Dot on Jan 24th garnered nearly 20k engagements, and while the news didn’t continue to swell much longer — largely due to her receiving help from the company’s Home Fund after TikTokers suggested it — it’s an example of a story a brand might want to keep an eye on.
Detect threats at all times with alerts
If a situation with potential to develop does arise, you can set up alerts to notify you directly through Slack, or have them sent to you and up to 10 other email addresses if more stories are published about that topic. Alerts allow you to set thresholds, so you can receive an alert for any new article, or only when an article or post is predicted to reach a minimum level of public engagement.
Using alerts combined with prediction means you will never miss an important story, because you can filter out the noise, and focus on the stories that are going to matter in the hours ahead. Especially when your company, or an important person within it, is being written about and gaining attention online.
On April 12th Fox News reported on the comments Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone made regarding President Biden and inflation rates. In just one day since the article’s publication it had received over 53.9k engagements, and in the following 19 hours it was predicted to reach 155.2k. The above graph shows public engagement levels to this story from the minute it was published, so you can see firsthand how fast news is spreading and how much attention it’s likely to receive.
Prediction is key for brands who need to be able to get ahead of a potential crisis situation, or to keep a watchful eye on a story like this one. Now that we covered prediction, we’ll show you how to benchmark your brand’s performance by using Combined Timelines.
If you’d like to learn more about NewsWhip Spike and Prediction, request a demo here to get started.
