Your Ultimate Social Media Crisis Management Plan
Businesses in this age require an active social media presence to stay in the race. With growing social media outreach and multiple business growth possibilities, social media can bring many unforeseen circumstances to your company and brand. Such circumstances that directly affect your company’s reputation and sales are labelled as social media crisis.
It is highly important for you to analyse the type of social media crisis that your company is facing and what mitigation practices as a social media crisis management plan can be used to handle it. A social media crisis may be a failed promotion campaign, data breaching or rants of multiple customers followed by a news break of your company on social media. Multiple social media platforms without any doubt facilitate your brand and its growth but in times of crisis can bring out some serious consequences.
Handling an enormous traffic of vexed social media users and their rants can be exhausting, this is when you surely need a social media crisis management plan. Here is your ultimate social media crisis management plan no matter what situation comes your way.
Pause
The key role while implementing a social media crisis management plan is to pause before that things go wrong any further. This means give a break to all your scheduled social media posts to avoid unwanted rants and criticism. Take a break and monitor what is happening to diagnose the root cause of the crisis.
Concede the issue
Once that you have dug into the cause and analysed what went wrong and where, always come out and acknowledge the issue. This is the best practice to do to initially cool down your angry customers and social media followers. Accept that yes something has gone wrong and let them know if your team is working on the damages.
Bring out facts
At times of crisis, especially on social media people use every possible way to exaggerate over an issue. This can highly damage your company’s reputation and leave your followers perplexed, resulting in more outrage. Assemble all relevant facts and figures of what went wrong and where to avoid any confusions and make them public as soon as possible. The best way is to set up a blog post and publish it on all your active social media platforms to target masses.
Breakthrough on social media platforms
After that you have published your company’s official statement related to the social media crisis, start responding on social media platforms. Set up response teams and buck up your customer support agents to answer all your social media follower’s queries in right time. The goal is to act as polite as possible to avoid any disputes.
You can even boost social media posts regarding the social media crisis management practices being taken in hand to target the right masses in right time.
Use infographics
Not all your social media followers might be interested in reading out your company’s official statement, this is when infographics can be used in the most effective ways. Call out your creative team to design infographics that clearly show all the facts and figures related to the crisis and management practices being done. Upload these on all social media platforms as soon as possible. Remember not to over bulge facts in an infographic, make them simple and understandable.
Allow people to vent out
Your social media followers might be angry about how things unfolded, to lighten up their flare, give them a channel to vent out. Let them bring out all the rage but remember to respond nicely. Once that they are done venting out, even if they do not find compensation, they will still feel relieved after ranting publicly. Hence, do not block off your followers from posting about your brand or company.
Not everything needs a response
Newton’s third law suggests that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ but in times of crisis management not everything needs a reaction. The key rule is to respond only twice as per not to add fuel to the fire. No matter how rude the user seems to be, respond, but not more than twice.
Teamwork
The foremost essential part of social media crisis management is teamwork. Make sure everyone in your company is aware of what went wrong and where. They must be active in assisting the social media front end teams to avoid any misinterpretation of information and mismanagement in times of crisis management.
Learn
Be positive about the situation and learn. Make documentation a habit, add all information about the crisis in a document for future references. This can save a lot of time and eliminate damages in times of future social media crisis if any.
Social media crisis can be detrimental for a company or brand. These steps mentioned above provide you with an efficient social media crisis management plan, but a company surely needs to implement some measures to eliminate the risk. Hence, pre-crisis planning is also essential. Want to learn about it? comment below!
