Developing a Crisis Management Plan for Social Media

 Indeed, much in the same way you have a Business Plan or a Marketing Plan, a Social Media Crisis Plan preconditions how you will behave in case of a threat to the online reputation of your brand. We are living in the age of social media crises as a real and a dangerous phenomenon. Regardless of whether you are online or not, you ought to remember that there is a shift in the consumer behavior and they are online. This notwithstanding a majority of companies turn the other way when the issue about how they are managing their online reputation or whether they already have a Social Media Crisis Plan ready in case it occurs.

They believe that it would not happen to them and the challenge comes when it does. The percentage of reputation crisis among the brands is estimated to be 83 percent within the next 5 years, nevertheless, it is a field that in most cases is at the backdrop. Little do they know that on the Internet everything goes fast and that any news may become the topic of conversation within several minutes. As such a situation was not expected in a crisis manual, very often, when such situations take place they succumb to the error of hurrying along with hot reactive measures therefore continuing to feed the frenzy.

What is social media crisis management?

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This, as it was to be predicted, makes their possible difficult and temporary issue such that it becomes a crisis of a bad reputation that they are not even sure of how to deal with. The number of reasons that can cause the crisis in any company is innumerable. There is always a chance that certain particular, unpredictable issues may appear or we will be under unfair attack by any kind of background: discharged workers, trolls, discontented clients, etc. Thus, the first thing to do is to learn that anything may get out of our hands and that a Social Media crisis may emerge to jeopardize your company and reputation any second.

The more these three components are overlapping, the more consistent the image and reputation of the brand will be, the better the attitude of your ideal clientele, the stronger the effects they will have on consumption of your products and/or services. Therefore, the reputation of every company, brand, or individual must be of concern to both online and offline reputation, according to the three addressed factors. Whether you are a megabrand, a small or a middle-sized business and/or whether you are a freelancer, does not matter. Brand reputation is not new to everyone.

Social media crisis management strategy

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It may need years of working to get a good online reputation and then just in a second, all this serious effort and work can lead to a nightmare. Consequently, a social media reputation crisis should be prepared where there are high chances of its occurrence. As we have observed above, everyone is at risk of attack, which, in turn, can produce a negative, long-term, and dangerous effect on the image of any company, brand, or individual not only online but also offline. Planning of online reputation management as you plan any activity or social media marketing strategy is very crucial.

In such a manner, you will not only be minding the reputation of the brand but also preventing, at the same time, the emotions to launch into any manifestation of criticism or the issue that might occur. First of all, a Crisis Plan must become part of the company Communication Plan. Now, here are the 6 important points that you can not omit when you outline your Social Media Crisis Plan and maintain your brand online reputation at the desired level. This is the most important thing because being proactive means being ready to any kind of social media crisis that may come up.

Steps for preventing a social media crisis

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The most efficient method to handle and avoid a possible crisis is to develop a plan on online reputation management and control. To this end, one must keep track of what people are saying about your brand, product or company and where they are saying it in order to become aware of any issues and be able to respond in time to curtail the results. This will also put you in a position to know what to do and how. You will realize all of those scenarios which you could have possibly averted with minor adjustments in how you approach things. It will be anticipated they will make you consider the various ways or potential reactions based on each case that may happen as we shall see below.

What are the worst scenarios that your company will have to contend with. Being aware of the various situations that your company could find itself in a crisis at one given time should help you come up with response parameters of each situation. then you should be able to simulate various kind of potential emergencies in a safe (private) setup in order to judge your capability to respond. Not every business is able to have resources or the capability of responding and reacting to a crisis of reputation. Every business, every brand, or every individual is equipped with dissimilar resources and dissimilar priorities.

Conclusion

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You should pre-determine the use of accounts to be able to respond accordingly in case of any social media crisis. Do you currently have a Social Media and / or customer service manager Do you do 24/7surveillance of your activity in various channels rhetorical questions such as the following examples may give you a clue on what you should do better or take into consideration in the course of setting up your Crisis Plan: Maintaining your e-brand reputation and being in control of what is going on over the Social Media is not something that you can achieve all by yourself.

To have a successful Crisis Plan, in case you are a big brand, then you will need to include some people of your company on your crisis management team. The number of people working in your team does not matter, all the messages can run only through a single person and the individual must be primed on what to say, in what language and at what time. In case you have a small business or simply work by yourself, chances are that you are all these profiles yourself. Not to worry, when developing your Crisis Plan, you can e.g. contact other colleagues in your market, influencers and/or loyal followers of your brand so that you should be able to rely on them at that time.