Whilst the social media realm presents a myriad of opportunities for savvy marketeers, it also opens you up to a host of negativity, complaints and issues. In terms of an actual physical crisis, social media is the perfect tool for communicating realtime updates, establishing authority and building trust and support – if it’s used correctly. Yet it can also destroy a brand if used incorrectly.
Whilst there are a number of issues and a certain amount of negativity that is inevitable on social media, there is also a lot that can be prevented by following a few simple steps and employing common sense and empathy. In advance of our session on social media crisis management with PRCA this week, we’ve shared the six steps below to help prevent issues, and to help reduce the impact of any negativity that does come through:
1. Monitor the conversation
You need to know alt’s being said, by who, when and where. This will give you an idea of popular content, pressure points and potential issues, allies and detractors. Make sure you’re not just following mentions of your brand – use social media to gather information on trends and as radar for potential threats or issues that might end up affecting your brand or community.
2. Be present and active
If an issue erupts on social media, you need to catch it early. If you don’t have an active presence/following on the channel and choose to respond to a crisis or issue, no one will see your response and it will be wasted. At the same time, you don’t want your profile and history to be full of apologies and issues response, without any positive content – when people scroll through your profile, they need to see variety and balance – that it’s more than a customer complaints line.
3. Prepare approved responses
You know the common complaints and potential threats to your brand reputation, so you should be able to craft appropriate responses that can be pre-approved and shared. This enables your team to respond quickly and effectively and nip some of the niggles in the bud. You can also highlight any of the words/phrases that need to be escalated, those issues that have the potential for a greater impact, that need to be handled sensitively.
4. Educate and empower your team
As per the previous point, make sure your team are empowered to respond immediately on the most common issues, and feel confident to do so. Make sure your team are educated and up-to-date with social media posting, scheduling, and monitoring tools, and the latest trends and techniques. Run crisis simulation sessions for those directly responsible for posting, and make sure everyone is aware of roles and responsibilities, as well as the escalation points.
5. Have a crisis strategy for escalated issues
Have a documented plan for your social media communications and how it changes in a crisis, so that everyone is aware of how posting plans, approvals, response times and roles might change during a crisis. Think about what will happen to scheduled content, to posting times/days, frequency of live posts, response times, shares, escalation and approval points, hashtags, images and videos. Make sure everyone is aware of this strategy and review it regularly.
6. Love your tribe
Ideally, if your social media is effective, then you should have an active community of advocates and supporters. These are the people that you would hope would leap to your defence and support you through your issues – helping to build credibility and trust and spread your message – amplifying the reach of your responses in a positive way. Don’t leave it until you have an issue to reach out and appeal to people, show the love for your tribe and build on it day-to-day.
These may be quite straight forward steps, but they are easy things to overlook in the excitement of everyday conversations and engagement. We’ll be going through these in more detail in our session with PRCA this week, as well as looking at how to respond in the instance that a crisis does break, and how to recover your brand afterwards. If you’d like to join us, please email sam@footstepcommunications.com
