How to Manage a Social Media Crisis in 8 Steps
Chaos can strike when we least expect it. Social media crisis management may sound scary, but your team can respond quickly and effectively by understanding the right action steps in unprecedented situations. An accessible crisis plan allows your team to manage the issue before it takes hold of your brand.
What is a Social Media Crisis Management?
Social media crisis management is a strategy to diminish abrupt and damaging events that affect your brand. This can be numerous actions – negative reviews, cyberbullying, and angry customers, to name a few examples This discourse can be shared and spread across social media and affect your brand reputation.
However, not all poor reviews or mean comments are considered social media crises. Unfortunately, we can’t control everyone’s opinions, and brands are bound to receive negative feedback online at some point. It is the larger matters – legal, financial, or accusatory – that need to be addressed to protect your company’s health.
Social Media Crisis Management in 8 Steps
Online confrontations can be uncomfortable, however, online users appreciate honesty over neglect. If your team comes across a crisis, addressing the problem first-hand will exemplify transparency.
Assess and understand the crisis
When noticing abnormal activity, it’s crucial to understand the source of the issue. Monitor the channels that have caused mention spikes and uncommon profile activities. Evaluate this in a Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How scenario.
- Who is included in this crisis?
- What are users saying online?
- Where did the crisis occur? Where else is it being discussed?
- When did this event happen?
- Why has this become a crisis and is it
- How has this affected your company thus far?
As you assess the situation, keep an objective mind as you gather as many facts as possible. Now, let’s go to the next step, securing your social media accounts. This is vital to ensure the safety of your profiles.
Protect social media accounts
What does it mean to protect your account? There are a few steps to take to ensure the safety of your accounts:
- Strong passwords: Utilizing strong passwords and diversifying passwords across accounts will mitigate the risk of users hacking into your account.
- Two-factor authentication: Adding a second form of login authentication such as email, phone number, or pin code.
- Consolidate account permissions: Ensure those with access to your account are team members or internal stakeholders. If there is a risk to this, consider changing passwords.
Regardless of a social media crisis, this step should be upheld within your organization, in case chaos does strike.
Monitor online brand mentions
The third step is monitoring what users are saying online about your brand. This includes mentions, commentary, threads, engagement spikes, etc. We also recommend searching your brand on Google and evaluating keywords related to the event.
As you gather this data, understand the sentiment and emotion displayed in the discourse, and those defending your brand.
Oatmilk brand Oatly has had continuous backlash for partnering with Blackstone, in which many social media users have posted their opinions, some even pushing for a #BoycottOatly, an active X (Twitter) hashtag.
Organize a crisis management team
Before drafting or posting a response, it’s crucial to brainstorm and communicate internally. This ensures everyone is aware of the issue, and that everyone’s opinions are heard. Delegate team members with specific tasks, from monitoring social mentions to keeping track of internal emails, to drafting a response.
As social media crises often involve legal issues, we highly recommend including your legal team and C-suite executives.
When delegating tasks, here are some roles to consider:
- Executive Team: Executives should be included in this conversation to address how this affects the company. This team should also monitor brand mentions and conversations outside social media, and start brainstorming rhetoric strategies.
- Managers/Leads: This team will delegate tasks, while heavily monitoring online happenings. This team should report to executives and the rest of the crisis team with updates.
- PR/Communications: This team will be responsible for helping draft the response. This team should control the narrative while staying transparent and empathetic.
- Customer Service: Customer service will be on the ground responding to internal messages. This messaging should be transparent and approved by the executive, managerial, and communications team.
- Legal: The legal team should investigate any related legal issues and report to the rest of the teams. This will help guide the response in a way that avoids further risk.
Discuss, determine, and delegate response strategy
After you have organized the crisis team and delegated responsibilities, it’s time to create your response draft. As mentioned above, this should be transparent and not avoidant of the issue. This response should also be timely, and published within a few days of the event. The longer the silence, the longer users will continue to give their opinions online.
While the response should attack the issue, it should reflect your brand voice and values. After KFC ran out of chicken in the majority of their 870 UK and Ireland restaurants after delivery delays, the company’s Twitter account posted this response:
On top of this, they printed ads rearranging the KFC letter on a bucket to own their “FCK” up. They also added a section on their website where customers could check the chicken status of their local restaurants. This example of crisis management shows honesty, while still letting their brand voice and values shine through.
Hold scheduled posts
While you draft your response, hold all scheduled posts. Posting during this time without addressing the issue will only make customers and followers feel you don’t care or want to avoid it. If you use a scheduling tool, like Metricool, it’s simple to drag and drop scheduled posts to another day. Focus on responding to comments during this time. This will allow you to have content to share in the following days or weeks.
Draft a response – internally and externally – quickly
While you should draft a public response, we recommend sending an internal response to your client base. This should still address the issue while being directed towards your customers. As mentioned above, this should be published within a matter of days.
Depending on where most of the chaos has occurred, we recommend publishing on this platform. If the issue is spread across multiple platforms, consider posting to your main platform, meaning which profile has the largest following. Internally, consider sending an email to your database including the response, posting it on your website, or both.
As we saw with the KFC examples, they took multiple actions to address the majority of their audience, rather than exclusively posting to one platform.
Respond to audience feedback empathetically
The last step of your crisis management process should include consistent audience feedback monitoring, and responding to every brand mention. While some negative comments may appear, we recommend responding to legitimate concerns online.
Receiving and responding to these messages may be overwhelming. To avoid this, we recommend using an inbox management tool, centralizing all social media messages and comments. Metricool’s inbox management tool gathers all social media mentions into a single inbox. This eliminates having to jump between networks. The feature includes filtering by network or message type and options to leave messages unread.
Conclusions
Social media crises can be scary, however, many brands have shown that they can be addressed and atoned. When brands show transparency and own to a mistake, this shows users that we are all human, and some things are out of our control. However, it’s important to take action, rather than avoiding the issue and keeping users in the dark.
Instead of scrambling after a crisis, we recommend creating a social media crisis management plan before an issue so you know what to do. Your team can follow the above 8 steps to ensure your response and actions are thorough. After you have completed your response, monitor the results and how you can improve in case of future discord. If there’s one thing you can take away from this, we all learn from our mistakes and honesty is always the best policy.
