One of the most significant contributors to a business's profit and success is its reputation. This is particularly true in this social media era when a single mistake by your business can go viral, affecting your business’s reputation. If a social media crisis is left unchecked, it can harm your business reputation and turn consumers against your brand. This is why businesses need good social media crisis management as part of their digital marketing strategies.

What is Social Media Crisis Management?

A social media crisis arises when negative content significantly harms your business reputation, either as an individual, brand, or organization. This could result from different controversies and events, such as insensitive or offensive content posted by a brand. Customer complaints about the brand or other employee misconduct can also cause it.

Social media crisis management involves creating a strategy to reduce the damage caused by negative messages concerning a brand on social media networks. It can take different forms, such as an apology or public explanation from the CEO. Taking such action is what is termed a social media crisis strategy.

Effective social media crisis management should be more than just posting an apology reel. Instead, it should involve a comprehensive response plan, a social listening strategy, and all the necessary steps before and after to mitigate an online hostility that can affect the brand's reputation.

Examples of Social Media Crisis

A social media crisis occurs when a sudden negative shift occurs in your brand’s online conversation. This involves more than the occasional negative complaint or comment from a customer. Instead, it consists of a flurry of negative comments, including calls to boycott the company's products. The social media crisis could be triggered by several factors, such as:

• A widespread failure or safety concern of your product.
• An insensitive social media comment.
• Poor behavior by employees.
• Misleading or false claims about your products or the competition.

Simply put, a social media crisis results from any action resulting in a customer’s anger, distrust, or disappointment. Once such is posted online, it can easily become a social media crisis.

Steps in Social Media Crisis Management

No matter the size of your business, you need a good social media crisis management strategy. The strategy indicates the course of action to take to contain a crisis. With such a plan, you can quickly mitigate the damage that might occur. A good part of social media crisis management involves several steps. These are:

Creating a Crisis Response Team

In case of a crisis, who will handle it, and what will be each team member's responsibility? You need to make this decision early enough before the crisis occurs. Determine the key stakeholders making the decisions and providing responses and ensure they have worked together before. Building trust isn't a one-day affair; going with a cohesive team that trusts one another can yield better results in anxious conditions.

This team could include various staff, such as spokespersons, executives, customer service staff, and legal professionals. For instance, you can use the customer care staff to gain insights into customer sentiments, while the legal advisor can provide regulatory and compliance information. All in all, keep a lean team without a lot of hierarchical structures to make swift decisions authoritatively. 

Access the Crisis and its Impact 

Before communicating internally or to the public, you must understand the crisis's origin, scope, and emotions. You can begin by documenting the event details. This way, you can visualize what happened and provide the crisis management team with a reference point.  There are several questions you should ask yourself, such as:

• What was the origin of the crisis, and who was involved? Was it due to a legitimately upset customer or a marketing team that made a questionable post?
• What are the facts of the events?
• Where did the event occur? Was it on a particular social media channel or a physical store?
• When did the event start? Ensure that you remain specific even in terms of the hours and minutes.

Once the above questions are answered, you can listen to your brand sentiments.

Social Media Listening

A key step in social media crisis management is detecting a crisis as it emerges in real-time. You can track that using social listening tools such as hashtags, brand mentions, negative comments, and more. Ensure that you are monitoring brand mentions even outside social media. You can do that by tracking your business name and the keywords related to the event. You can also set up your Google Alerts. When doing social listening, ensure that you are on the lookout for any misinformation to address it, too.

Ensure that you are also listening to your audience by reading their posts and comments. Check if negative comments and users are defending you. You can use the main thread and the emotions generated to guide a response.

Coordinate the Response Team

When facing a social media crisis, you don't want a situation where there is a misalignment of the team handling the crisis. That’s why you must provide the necessary roles for the response and assign the responsibilities to each team member. Some of the roles you should have in your social media communication are:

• Point/lead. This will be the person handling the primary response. Their role is to organize communication and collaborate with different team members, such as content creators who produce social media posts.
• Approver. The approver will be responsible for approving posts created to address the crisis.
• Product or technical support. Did product failure cause the crisis? If your answer is yes, you need to liaise with the product team to enable you to respond quickly and give updates.
• Legal. You need a legal officer to liaise with the approvers to ensure legal communication.

In addition to the above, you need technology and a communication method. This is where the workflow comes into play.

Information Flow

You want to determine how the information will flow and how decisions will be made quickly. You need to identify the stakeholders mentioned earlier and the channels to use to ensure a fast flow of information. Some tools like Microsoft Temand and Slack can improve communication between team members. Such a setup will reduce the confusion among the team members and ensure they are on the same page when handling the crisis.

Assigning your Twitter marketing to an intern can help you save money, but it can also be a recipe for disaster. The person handling the crisis should be level-headed, well-organized, detailed, and capable. It would be a good idea to choose someone with experience in public relations as it helps to prevent mistakes. If you don't have a specialist to disseminate the information, you can outsource to a digital marketing agency.

Create a Response Strategy

After creating a team and workflow strategy, you will have the foundation of your strategy. Now, it's time to make a response strategy. This strategy should cover:

• Key messaging. This is the official response to the crisis, how you plan to address it, and what people should expect in the future.
• Triage. Consider whether it will be necessary to delete the offending post or publish an acknowledgement post before the response.
• Channels. This may include the social media platform you will be using, as well as other channels, such as press releases and emails.
• Training. You need to educate staff that interact with customers, such as sales and customer service, on how to answer questions concerning the crisis. Use practice scenarios to see if there are gaps. That means if mistakes were made, these would be ideal for training other team members.  
• Incoming messages. When you get direct messages, comments, and emails, how will you respond to them on social media channels? If your Instagram DM isn't working, you need to understand how to fix it.
• Monitoring. Consider the media sources and platforms you plan to continue monitoring.

Choosing the Right Communication Channel

Your channel choice affects the message you will send during a crisis and you need to select the right platform for your audience. For instance, Google used X to inform people how its AI generator missed the mark by depicting colored people as the early American colonialist.

To determine the right channel, list the channels your audience spends a lot of time on. You can then choose the one that best matches your messaging. If you are dealing with product malfunction, TikTok is not the right platform to address that. Instead, LinkedIn can be great for sharing your apology with investors. 

The channel where the crisis occurred is also good for disseminating your message. On top of that, you can use other key channels such as:

• Twitter. Journalists and media houses are very active on Twitter, which is, therefore, a great place to spread your message.
• Instagram. This is the most popular channel for reaching celebrities and influencers.
• Facebook. This platform has an extensive reach as it is the most popular social media site.

Pause All Your Scheduled Posts

No matter how captivating your next post is, it will perform poorly when you are in a crisis. Therefore, consider pausing to deal with the current crisis. If you create a poorly timed post, it will look goofy. It might even derail your ability to deal with the crisis. You should ensure that all your communications are well-planned and consistent and use the right tone.

Respond Fast while Showing Empathy

Avoid not responding or providing an insincere response when managing a social media crisis. Even as you respond fast, you must consider the situation and the involved persons well. If you are giving an apology, make sure it does not feel insincere or scripted and instead make the apology feel personalized.

When writing an apology, start by acknowledging the problem. Show users that you are aware of the situation and its gravity. Then, update them on how you will handle the crisis while providing a timeline for taking action.

Monitor Your Audience’s Response

The crisis is not solved after an apology and a solution are issued. While doing that is critical to saving your brand's reputation, it's not the end of the crisis. You need to keep monitoring whether the crisis is worsening or dying. This will require you to use social listening tools to understand what people say about your brand and change your message accordingly.

If the audience is angry or feels disappointed, don't ignore them. Instead, you must engage them to show that you care about their concerns. Keep your responses short and, above all, avoid arguing with your audience. While you might be tempted to defend yourself or confront your audience, avoid doing that. Instead, acknowledge their frustrations and concerns. If people feel they require more attention, you can initiate a conversation with them via email, private calls, or messaging.

Update Your Team

Remember that misinformation can spread internally in your company. If top management remains silent during misinformation, whispers and tones will increase. Remember that crisis information also includes internal communication. This helps to keep everyone on the same page and reduces uncertainty and tension. If there is an action you plan to take, be clear about it. Inform all people in the organization on what they should say or avoid saying.

An External Response Strategy

You need to determine how you will communicate across different social media channels. It would be helpful to have a communication template for other social media posts and the FAQs section. However, even as you do that, you must remember that each crisis is unique and should be handled on its merit.

Have a Post-crisis Review and Suggest Improvements

While the social media crisis can be stressful, you can also learn important lessons about it. After going through the storm, stop and evaluate what caused it. Use the experience to find out how your brand got into the problem and how you successfully dealt with the challenge. You need to have a way of reviewing the effectiveness of a response and the changes to procedures and policies. You should use data when reviewing, especially when conducting sentiment analysis and other online discussions.

Use that opportunity to open a cross-function communication. Take time to learn from the experiences of your customers. Understand the role of social media in handling a crisis with your leadership team. Check your history of social sentiments using tools such as Hootsuite. You can then map out if there are changes in sentiments after you take action and update your communication plan using the results.

Tips to Prepare for a Social Media Crisis

A good social media management plan involves preparing for a crisis in advance. The earlier you can detect a social media crisis, the better your chances of reducing or avoiding the damage. Brands can use a two-pronged approach to prevent a small problem from becoming a major crisis.

One of them is by observing the response they get to their posts. Secondly, they can keep an eye on particular brand mentions. They can search for their brand names on TikTok and X. If there are negative posts, they can become aware of them fast and nip them in the bud before they explode. If you notice a sudden spike in your brand reshares, you must observe keenly to ensure it isn't due to something negative.

Keep Your Account Secure

While having an unauthorized person access your account is not good, it can get worse during a crisis. Follow these tips to keep your account safe:

• Use a strong social media account. Ensure you have a strong password for your account, which should be updated regularly. This is particularly important when one of your unauthorized persons leaves your company.
• Use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is a great way to add extra layers of security. It involves receiving a code in a text message or email before a login is authorized, even when the correct password is entered.
• Have centralized permissions. Permissions to users should be controlled, and permission should be granted to the right team only.

You might consider locking the comment section, but this isn't always helpful. If not handled well, it can fuel the fire.

Have a Social Media Policy

One of the best ways of preventing a crisis is by having a social media policy. This should have appropriate guidelines to provide expectations for your branded account and the level of information employees can share in their public accounts. It should also provide managers with ideas for social media content. If you lack a social media crisis plan, start by making one. This should be done early enough before a crisis arises. Doing that will provide a clear headway of how you should react when a social media emergency occurs.

It is also important to remember that you don't need to be too rigid in following your social media policy. When you do that without having a second opinion, things could worsen. Instead, be comfortable pivoting. It is advisable to seek the input of your managers when things start to get spicy.

Give Prominence to Your Audience

Avoid rushing into doing things. Instead, think of what you want to say. Take time to understand what your audience expects from you. When thinking through things, you want to check if it is necessary to respond. When you speak out, does it bring more attention than when you remove a comment or post?

After becoming empathetic, reply according to your audience's needs rather than your feelings. Avoid becoming defensive and instead validate your audience’s feelings. Remember that nothing lasts forever, and this, too, shall pass.

Regular Audience Engagement

If you are only pitching products to your followers instead of engaging in meaningful conversations, you might be unable to address customer’s concerns early enough. Instead of viewing your social media profiles as a place to make sales, you can use them to respond to your customers' queries and increase brand loyalty.

One study noted that 49% of customers expect brands to respond to their complaints on Twitter, but only 29% of complaints received a response. The study also noted that the customers who complained expected a response within four hours, but the average brand responded within ten hours. Therefore, to avoid a social media crisis, ensure that you respond fast and professionally when negative comments about your company arise.

Draft the Employee Social Media Strategy

Most employees consider their social media profiles as a safe place to rant about their stressful work situations. This can lead to a serious crisis when coworkers or customers see such posts. To avoid a crisis arising from your employees' posts, you need to create guidelines on how they can mention the company and its posts online. When doing that, avoid looking like you are trying to intimidate them not to post. If your employees are happy, you will be amazed by how far they go in promoting your brand.

Conclusion

When well used, social media can be a valuable tool to take your business to the next level. However, it can also be a two-edged sword that can harm the reputation and, consequently, the profitability of your business. To avoid such issues, you should regularly monitor problems, perform social listening, and react fast and compassionately. You should also plan in advance to handle a social media crisis. By doing that, you can maximize the benefits of social media profiles without a potential crisis.