As a brand, social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Through it you can communicate and attract potential customers, but it can also easily tarnish your image if not maintained properly.
Know how to perpetuate your uniquely developed brand voice through crisis. Maintain your cool with these worst-case scenario social situations and solutions.
Tarnished on Twitter
Twitter acts as an instant and perpetual source of communication for your brand. With Twitter, you can quickly and directly interact with your customer base. Though Twitter is the prime resource to participate in great conversations around your brand, the quick format means impulsive assumptions or negative reactions sometimes happen.
When dealing with a not-so-nice tweet or a publicly aired internal crisis, make sure you do so in a patient, reasonable manner. Think about the long-term implications of everything you tweet, and keep your brand voice active throughout any conversations. It’s easy to misrepresent your company in 140 short characters.
Bad Review on Facebook
Unlike Twitter, the long-form, long-term conversations on Facebook seem to stay present a bit longer. A negative review will undoubtedly be more in-depth, and will likely garnish more heat. To deal with a negative review on Facebook, monitor the social platform often.
Reviews can be “stuck” on your brand page as a comment, a post, a review, or even via a public photo tagged at your location. When responding, have empathy for the situation and understand that your customer went out of their way to review you, positive or negative.
Think of the negative implications on your brand for each well-crafted post and respond according to the severity, always aiming to take the conversation from public view to private.
Offer to have the reviewer direct message you and solve the issues away from where it can damage your brand.
A great outline for this always-on brand management style is Lifelock.com, who responds to claims personally and resourcefully on Facebook. Utilize this same format as an actionable way to respond to your own inquiries or complaints.
Negative Yelp Review
Yelp relies on an algorithm to determine which reviews are initially visible and which are not, but even the negative reviews are moved to a filtered section of your page.
Since the people who interact on Yelp are typically more passionate, in-depth reviewers, it is usually best to respond to reviews. Respond in a quick and civil manner. Offer solutions, and be consistent. Entrepreneur.com gives tips about how to respond to such a review.
If you respond to one review on this public, somewhat static platform, it’s best to respond to all. It may seem like a lot of work, but handling a bad situation effectively can be as powerful, if not more powerful, than a bad review.
Unfortunately, issues happen. If a negative situation arises that is your brand’s responsibility, the best thing you can do is manage the situation in a PR-friendly way. Release a press release apologizing for the situation and amend the issue. Continue to respond to every public request possible on social media, and offer actionable solutions when possible.
