Why Brands Like US Airways Need an Enterprise Tool for Publishing

An Oversight Disaster

For nearly an hour, appalled users talked about the offending tweet – a normal Twitter @ reply that included not a link to the US Airways site, but rather a very explicit pornographic photo. This is indicative of a trend we’ve seen here at Socialbakers, in which top brands turn away from using enterprise tools for publishing. This is absolutely a mistake.

Surely, US Airways is looking in to how their misstep happened, and how the photo remained live on its Twitter feed for so long. An enterprise tool like Socialbakers Community Management would have alerted the US Airways social media team that something was going drastically wrong with their Twitter feed, and let them take the tweet down quickly.

It’s not that they don’t respond quickly to tweets – the dissatisfied customer who actually received the offending tweet was complaining that they hadn’t responded to her earlier tweets, but this is untrue. They replied to her first tweet (sans visual aid) in 7 minutes. In fact, our soon-to-be-released Socially Devoted data for Q1 ranks US Airways 4th among all airlines for question response. It’s ordinarily quite good at responding to customer queries, but they might agree that slowing the process down for the sake of quality control would have been good in this case.

Methods of Control

On social, you can publish directly through easy tools like Tweetdeck, or through advanced, enterprise-grade social publishing and management tools with great workflow capabilities; products that are built by companies like Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and Socialbakers.

There are a number of ways to both publish scheduled content and social care updates in high volume in order to make sure they are great.

• Schedule all your updates
• Have approval rights set with the right person or people
• Make sure you have sufficient human resources – the best airlines have up to 100 employees working on their social media pages.

Managing Permissions with Builder

To control who publishes on your pages, you need to be an admin for the Builder account with full editing rights. If that is the case, then go into ‘Settings’ and click ‘Edit Team Role’.

This will define who has what degree of account access. Here, you can see an account admin enabled to give an employee different degrees of account ownership for different administered pages.

When a content creator does not have account admin rights, their posts will go through the account admin for approval.

This will enable you to prevent a disaster like what US Airways suffered.

Had US Airways’ social media team been using Builder, they would have been able to identify the offending tweet before it even went live. As an editor I know once said, “Redundancy is everything.” Translation: Have a safeguard method for your social posting. With Builder, admins can set roles and permissions for different accounts. Workflow management is absolutely key to being secure in your social presence.

For US Airways, this was the perfect storm of social media failure, and it could easily have been minimized, if not prevented entirely.