Earlier this year, Toyota announced a series of recalls for many of their most popular models. The uproar in media has definitely impacted Toyota sales, not to mention their overall reputation as America’s top selling auto brand. So what did Toyota do to manage this crisis? They took to the world of social media. Now to answer the question that everyone is dying to know: is it working?

Here we see the rise in social media activity from the end of 2009 to present day. The number of raw posts has quadrupled, hitting a high point of nearly 120,000 posts in a single day. Today’s biggest related news: The Run Away Prius.

Looking at sentiment, to the left we see an analysis of how people felt about Toyota pre-incident. To the right, you can see the influx of negativity as it increases about 30%. And it doesn’t seem to be calming down one little bit.

Above is an illustration of sentiment over time. As you can see, the red line (which depicts negativity) has yet to show a distinct decline, meaning that people are still upset and Toyota needs to try harder at resolving these issues. Hmm.. now if only they could figure out where to start…

By looking at this classification of buzz, it looks like they should start with Twitter as it is pulling in the biggest portion of the traffic. Toyota has a big following on Twitter whether they’re direct followers or not. It’s time for Toyota to accelerate and start reaching out one to one.