Social media crises are a part of life now and they are more common than you might think. There are stories daily of crises happening with social media influencers, brands, or companies. With a major chunk of our lives being spent online, it is important to identify when a social media crisis occurs and how to handle one. Here are a few tips for handling a social media crisis if you ever find yourself in one:
Stay calm
The first thing you should do amidst a social media crisis is stay calm, and act rationally. The worst thing you can do is freak out and end up commenting something that will make the citation worse. Take a step back and figure out what’s going on, and how you should react. Or in rare cases, if you should react at all.
Acknowledgment
Acknowledge the crisis without arguing it. Let your followers and fans know that an incident has occurred and you are working on a response. Take your time to respond to the crisis and make sure that you are responding in the best possible way. Taking time will help you understand and manage the situation better, while also giving people time to placate themselves and possibly others.
Stop posting
After announcing that you are working on a response, it’s absolutely crucial to stop all planned posts or any other posts that don’t have to do with the crisis at hand. It’s a really bad look to continue posting like everything is normal. It tells the public that you do not care about them or the issue.
Respond to the crisis
After you have taken the time to fully understand the crisis, you will be ready to post your response. There are a number of things you need to bring up. First start by creating a summary of the situation to show the public that you fully understand the situation and how it has affected the public.
Then you need to do a call to action. Explain how you are fixing the problems. Your remedial steps could be to educating yourself, holding the people accountable for the situation, and/or setting new rules or policies to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
TL:DR
In almost every likelihood you will make better decisions if you don’t panic and blurt out an emotional response. When situations like this occur, the quality of your response is much more important than how quickly you respond. By taking these steps, you will assure the public that you are taking the situation seriously and really care about the situation and the people involved in it and that you care about how you or your brand or company is represented to the public.
