Putting Out Social Media Fires

Social media can be a high-risk, high-reward strategy. It’s important to protect your company image on social media.

Crisis

Social media crisis cases are common in today’s world of quick news and quick responses. Let’s look at the three most common:

1. Preventable crisis. Tweets or Facebook Posts with offensive or insensitive messages that are not edited, proofed, or viewed by an outside party before they are deployed will most likely backfire.
2. Responsive crisis. It’s important you have a social media response/crisis plan for responding to complaints or a crisis. One poor response to a customer online could end up as negative publicity on sites like Reddit or BuzzFeed.
3. Employee crisis. If you don’t clearly define social media policies with your employees, they won’t know what’s acceptable and what’s not. Be clear about what they are allowed to do and what could potentially get them in trouble.

How to Respond

Your response to a social media crisis is critical. It’s vital to remain clear, concise, and honest. If necessary, offer a sincere apology and how you will handle the situation moving forward.

How to Prevent

There’s no 100 percent guarantee to preventing a crisis, but there are simple steps you can take to cover as many bases as possible.

1. Be smart. Avoid controversial topics in society. Most consumers don’t want to hear from brands when a tragedy, political event, or social controversy takes place. Brands are more likely to lose customers when they do comment on such things.
2. Proofread. Before deployment, be sure to have all content going out on social channels reviewed by as many eyes as possible.
3. Stick to you. Stick to who you are. If your brand maintains a consistent voice and message and stays real with customers, they are more likely to come back and recommend it!

Although social media has associated risks, don’t be afraid to avoid it completely. Social media can help you reach more consumers and is a valuable part of your integrated marketing strategy, as long as you use the right channels for your audience.

Published on: August 3, 2015