Crisis management on social media can help prevent devastating consequences to your brand.

Not everyone engages in crisis management on social media. Many brands choose to remain silent until an event has passed, and prefer to deal with it in a more conventional manner (e.g. press conferences).

While it may be a little nerve-racking to deal with a crisis in media as public, active and real-time as social networks, it can be a very valuable feature that should not be ignored.

Get a Handle on the Situation

The ability to monitor conversations on social media about your brand means that when a crisis does break, you will be able to know about it at the same time as everyone else. After all, social media is one of the first avenues people are using to spread the word nowadays.

Waiting until after the issue has evolved beyond your control can be far more detrimental than engaging at the outset of a crisis. Thus, you have a much better chance of quelling issues by taking control of it with an active, live audience.

Show People You Care

It might be for legal or PR reasons that you are not engaging with an angered audience on social media. But whatever it is, your brand stands to sustain far more damage when it does not engage.

People tend to think that when they are ignored by a brand on social media – particularly when they are speaking specifically to that brand’s social personality – it is because that brand does not care about the small, singular customer. That is not only an insult to the customer, but a bad representation of your brand to the customer base as a whole.

It is important to plan for crises on social media in order to know how to engage your audience when one does come up. (No brand is immune to these sorts of issues!) In this way, if a crisis should arise, you can have a legal department-approved approach to handling the issues.

This will show your audience that you care and will go a long way with them.

Social Equity of Crisis Management on Social Media

So where is there value added to your business? The Social Equity derived is both in the form of long-term value to your company and in terms of what your brand stands to lose without such a plan.

In the long run, your brand will have a carefully laid out strategy that can be applied to prevent issues from shooting beyond your control. With regards to what stands to be lost without such a strategy, think of crises you have witnessed in the past where brands did nothing to engage their audience.

In a recent case study about Nutella, we pointed out that the backlash which resulted from doing nothing to handle a crisis that broke out on social media meant some significant repercussions for the brand. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.

What other incidents can you think of where crisis management on social media has helped (or could have helped) a brand? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!