Sainsbury's Local

Conversocial will monitor Sainsbury’s social media accounts

Sainsbury’s has become the latest supermarket to hire Conversocial to help manage its social media response to crises such as Horsegate.

Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose have also teamed up with the US based social media specialists, which also has offices in the UK.

The company specialises in managing social media accounts across multiple platforms including Facebook and Twitter, and claims to be skilled at defusing potentially tricky situations of the sort that have plagued retailers and fmcg companies in the past “before they hit crisis point”.

Conversocial’s software works by pulling all comments or pictures from a social media page into a single feed, which allows its agents to establish exactly what content has been seen or what is new, assign comments for clients to respond to and automatically flag up comments based on keywords - such as ‘horse’.

By doing so, Conversocial says companies can engage with every post in under 45 minutes. Agents can also use “conversational marketing” to deliver a positive customer experience, even if the initial post was the result of a negative one.

A Sainsbury’s spokesman said: “Social strategy is managed in house working with a variety of vendors and agencies. Conversocial are one of the partners that we work with on delivering customer care.”