Chances are you won’t need to handle a major social media crisis for any of your clients, but the amount of money, time and stress your agency will save by preparing for one is immeasurable.
The other benefit of preparing early is to get into the “planning ahead” mindset and instill confidence in your new clients.
Strengthen your business pitch and show them what they want to see - that you can masterfully represent them online, no matter the weather.
This means creating a stellar social media management plan you can rely on when times get tough.
According to the Capterra’s Crisis Communications Survey, w only 49% of surveyed U.S. companies have a formal crisis communication plan
18 hours and 57 minutes is the average time between first warning and first news piece for a company handling a crisis.
All while the effects of a global crisis, like a drop in share price, was recorded in 53% of the surveyed companies and didn’t bounce back in a year’s time.
Each social media crisis is unique (just like your clients), but there are commonalities in how a business should respond to one.
Download our social media crisis management playbook to learn how to identify, prepare and handle a social media crisis.
One big part of crisis management is monitoring social media channels like Twitter to identify issues as early as possible.
Keep an eye on how other social media accounts are engaging with your company's account, and how social media users are reacting to statements you put out.
Look for an increase in negative comments, but mind that not all crises start and end on social media.
These may lay the ground to a crisis as well:
- An accident happens that gets immediate news coverage
- The CEO of the company creates a PR disaster during an interview
- Ex-employee of the company shares sensitive information on Reddit that goes viral
Since all your communications (social media replies, public statement, blog or website page) must be approved by your client, you need an efficient, close to flawless set of social media guidelines and approvals system in place to deal with social media crises.
Create a plan that outlines the severity of a crisis, its owner, key stakeholders as well as the roles and responsibilities of both teams.
Schedule a fire drill to test if the plan works to complete the preparation - it will take effort but it will be worth it.
While you create your social media crisis management plan, make sure everyone on your crisis team knows what their role is. Using Sendible's assigning task feature could be helpful in this regard.
Learning from Mistakes: The Path to Mastering Social Media Customer Service
What’s included in our social media crisis management plan?
- How to use monitoring to identify a social media crisis early
- How to distinguish a problem from a social media crisis and where to look
- Why you should deal with your client’s social media crisis swiftly
- What you’ll need to tackle any kind of social media crisis (For example: How would you deal with negative comments on social media?)
- The seven most common social media crises and how to handle them
- How to avoid the small day-to-day errors that will hurt your client-agency relationship
- How to create a crisis communication team and better your social media crisis communications.
- Your two-page social media crisis management template with a handy checklist to guide you in the moment. This will also help you decide what an appropriate social media crisis response should be.
Crisis Management Guide: Prepare for a crisis early
