How to Manage a Social Media Crisis

If there's one thing that every social media management team dreads, it's a social media crisis. Although a real-life crisis is defined as a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger, it's a little bit different for social media. A social media crisis can come in many ways, shapes, or forms, but it typically looks like one or more customers sharing a bad experience with your business online, causing a frenzy within your online audience.

This tends to multiply for larger businesses with larger customer bases, especially when the businesses have made a pretty serious mistake. Putting out fires on social media is something that no social media management team wants to have to do.

However, it does happen from time to time, so let's go over a few best practices on how to manage a social media crisis.

1. Utilize a social listening tool.

First and foremost, you need to set up a social listening tool or software so that you can catch any potential social media crisis before it blows up or goes viral. The most basic way of doing this is setting up a Google Alert for your business name, but there are many tools available that will search in more extensive ways.

A social listening tool should be monitoring all social media platforms and search engines for any mention of your business name, hashtag, or social media handle. Not every customer tags your business when they talk about you, so having the means to still find conversations surrounding your business (especially potential crises) is essential.

2. Know what constitutes an actual crisis.

A bad review or a couple of mean tweets does not a crisis make. Sure, they're still unfortunate. In a perfect world, you would have great reviews all of the time. But the hard truth is that you can't always please everybody, and sometimes customers want to air out their bad experience.

Here are a few examples of an actual social media crisis:

• A customer (or group of customers) has a legitimately bad experience, shares it on social media, and causes friends, family, and strangers to become angry with your company as well.
• Your company accidentally shares/does something offensive, whether it's an unintentionally offensive marketing campaign, tweet, Facebook post, etc.
• Customers have a string of bad experiences (i.e., a string of food poisonings) or an issue like product recalls that cause unrest with the company and diminishes trust.

3. Own up to your mistake.

If there was a mistake made on the company's part, the very first thing you need to do is own up to it. The absolute worst thing you can do during one of these times is to stay silent. Acknowledge the issue before you can continue.

This helps your customer base maintain their trust in your company. Everyone makes mistakes and owning up to it, acknowledging that something has happened, and making a plan to move forward can help your customers to still have faith in your business and your brand.

4. Address the issue directly.

Don't speak in riddles or try to apologize without actually apologizing. Instead, plainly and clearly address the issue at hand on your social media platforms. Discuss what happened in full, ensuring that your audience is fully aware of the situation at hand. You don't want to exacerbate the situation by getting caught evading the full story or leaving out important pieces.

Instead, cover all of your bases, and then move forward to address how your company has handled the situation, is handling it, or plans to handle it.

Be empathetic to all people involved, and stay logical rather than emotional. Although you want your business to be genuine in its response, you don't want to have an emotional response to the backlash. You do not want to bring any personal feelings or thoughts into your response. Your response should simply address what happened, apologize, and clearly state how it will be fixed.

5. Create a plan for moving forward.

Depending on what the crisis was, you need to create an internal or external plan moving forward to ensure that this won't happen again. Although you don't always need to be completely transparent and share the specifics of this plan with your audience, there may still be times you want to reassure them of how you know an issue like this will never happen again.

There may be times where you have to let an employee go due to a mistake on their part. Perhaps your company needs to come up with a policy change on what to share online or what marketing campaigns fall in line or out of line with your branding.

Whatever the issue, make sure that everyone within the company understands the plan to ensure the problem doesn't happen again.

Resolving a social media crisis is stressful and requires a lot of hands on deck. Sometimes there are consequences for what started the crisis in the first place, and the bigger the brand, the bigger the consequences. Following these guidelines, having a crisis communication policy in place, and always staying true to your brand values can help your business manage (and hopefully avoid) its own social media crisis.

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