Handling a Social Media Crisis
You are dealing with a social media crisis. The volume has gone up and it’s only a matter of time before it goes viral, or, even worse, it’s already gone viral. How do you handle your social media crisis management?!
Your company’s social media accounts are blowing up because of a(n):
- issue with your product/service
- accidental tweet or post by an employee
- unintentionally insensitive campaign or ad
- something equally controversial
Create Your Social Media Crisis Management Playbook
Get a Social Listening Tool
During a social media crisis, your social listening tool will be your best friend. It will keep track of the timeline of your crisis and provide insight into what people are saying during the crisis as well as what consumers are saying in response to your crisis management tactics.
Alerts
Our greatest ally for a social crisis is our alerting system. At Synthesio, when you set up your dashboard, you are able to set alerts that will notify you in real time that something is happening in your dashboard.
Within our Alerts, you will be able to choose what type of alerts you want. For the crisis management use case, we would advise you to set your scheduling for volume increases. In our Alerts, you are able to set it for a volume increase of 50%, 100%, 200%, or 400%. This data is based on the last 6 hours of volume as compared to the same 6 hr time period of the previous 7 days. Once a crisis hits and enough volume gathers in your dashboard, a notification will be sent to you to warn you to check that something is brewing.
Tracking the Crisis
The timeline of the crisis will be apparent immediately as there will be a spike in volume. An existing social listening program will allow you to use your historical monitoring as a reference to “pre-crisis” and a goal for “post-crisis”. Course the ebb and fall of the crisis using our timelines.
In the Sentiment timeline, the negative timeline will most likely be your focus, but you should also look at your positive timeline to see if any of your crisis management efforts are turning the tides for your consumers. What is causing a positive spike? If there is a positive spike during the crisis, can you turn it into a bigger spike. etc.
What are They Saying?
You can use our Word Clouds to track people’s reactions to the different responses to the crisis or the events within the crisis. What are people’s responses to your public relation efforts? What message has resonated with them? What are you saying that isn’t working at all? This will be a good gauge in seeing the general mood of the situation.
Repairing Your Social Reputation
During the course of your social media crisis management, our Social Reputation Score widget will become an extremely useful measure of whether you’re on the right track to repairing your social standing amongst your consumers. Using our SRS, you’ll be able to track the evolution of your social reputation week over week and see if your crisis mitigation efforts have paid off. If you’ve had a monitoring dashboard already set up, you’ll also be able to level set and see how your metrics looked prior to the crisis so you have a goal to get back to.
Hopefully, with social listening monitoring and these tips, your social media crisis will have been caught early and dealt with swiftly. For more information on on how social listening can help you with your next crisis management, check out our ebook: Plan For Your Next Crisis With Social Intelligence.
