What is the best practice in handling a social media crisis?

Social media crisis is very common in the digital age making many brands prone to reputational damage. In the age when traditional public relations (PR) was prevalent before the new media and digital realities, organizations, businesses and brands were not at a high risk of encountering a crisis as they are now. In the social media era, all it takes to damage a brand’s reputation is owning a social media presence and a voice, unlike the traditional PR age which requires a lot more. This places a lot more demand on communications professionals to avoid incidents of social media crisis.

In a media and communications journal where Priscilla Kwekie and Phillip Kwaku wrote on the role of social media in information dissemination to improve youth interactions, the investigation on how youths of a Ghanaian community use social media shows some of its unique characteristics. This includes its ability to affect interpersonal communication and easily create advocacy. So, in an instance where a product user makes a social media outburst with negative sentiments on the product or brand that many other social media users have, it becomes the foundation of a crisis that can hugely affect the brand’s reputation, license to operate and stakeholders’ trust.

It is best practice to put in place structures that completely avoid the rise of a social media crisis but in the unfortunate instance where one occurs, the following steps should be adopted to quickly de-escalate the sentiments on social media.

Ways to handle a crisis on social media

• Develop a crisis communications team: This is very important in proactively handling any kind of crisis. Apart from the unique characteristics of a social media crisis which include (among many others) its ability to spread faster.
• Engage stakeholders: It is unwise to be writing statements and press releases to the general public on your social media channels alone without engaging key stakeholders. The communications team need to agree on what the issue is, which stakeholder is core and what can or cannot be said to them in the engagement. Stakeholder relationship and management is important in a crisis to gain the trust of core stakeholders amidst the outburst on social media. You will also need a plan to regularly update them on the happenings, highlighting your resolve to maintain the best standard in service delivery alongside restoring normalcy. Businesses organizations or brands are in danger of losing major stakeholders when this step is not implemented.
• Social listening tools: Leveraging social listening tools must be included in the day-to-day communications activities of any brand. Social listening is a helpful digital concept that helps brands know what is being said about them. If the data from social listening tools are effectively and promptly analyzed and utilized, it completely avoids the risk of a social media crisis because the sentiments are easily detected and attended to before they become viral.
• Media monitoring of the conversation: You can monitor the conversation to discover what people are saying, what platform the sentiment is spreading the most in, who is in the conversation. This information determines how major the crisis is and can help in crisis response. You will find this video on managing crisis communication very useful.
• Feedback mechanism: As much as brands are very prone to social media crisis in the digital age, it is also easy to avoid and handle them and feedback mechanism is one of such ways to avoid a social media crisis. Some social media channels now avail you the opportunity to conduct polls and get information from social media users about your brand. Staying active in the comment section can also help communications professionals monitor concerns and act on time. Some social media outbursts that result in crisis are often because the brand did not pay attention to their concerns or ignored legitimate requests.

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Sola Abulu & Associates (SA&A) is a strategy and communications training and consulting firm focused on enabling businesses and organizations to achieve their desired objectives through ethical and strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation management.