Reputation and public perception are major contributors to sales, profits, and the success of any business.
Nothing damages a small business’s reputation more than a social media crisis. A social media crisis can turn consumer sentiment against a brand if left unchecked.
However, with a preventative and proactive approach to social media crisis management, small businesses can withstand a crisis and even bolster their brand’s reputation in the face of the nastiest social media crisis.
This comprehensive guide covers all social media crisis management aspects relevant to small business owners.
What Is a Social Media Crisis?
A social media crisis refers to any incident or controversy that arises online, often unexpectedly, and threatens to tarnish a brand’s reputation.
In one survey, 69% of business owners said they experienced a crisis over the last five years, and 95% of leaders said their social media crisis action plan needs improvement.
These crises can occur for many reasons, often beyond the business’s power to prevent — in many instances, all you can do is respond. But your decision-making in times of crisis and how you respond makes or breaks the public’s perception of your business.
For example, a disgruntled customer’s negative post or review might go viral; an employee might upset a customer, or a social media post from your brand might be insensitive and misinterpreted by the public.
Social media crises can also arise if your business makes a decision that doesn’t align with customer expectations — like when PayPal decided to update their “Acceptable Use Policy” last year with a clause that allows PayPal to withdraw $2,500 from users’ accounts if that user posted anything the company deemed as “misinformation or offensive.”
Understandably, this resulted in a social media crisis in the form of the #BankruptPayPal movement, with customers turning to Twitter to first spread the news about PayPal’s decision and then to encourage others to take action by closing their PayPal accounts:
The boycott directly impacted PayPal’s value, causing it to drop over 13% following its policy update. This shows the potential business impact of a social media crisis:
Other examples of social media crises include:
False information being spread about your company
Security breaches exposing customers’ private data
Illegal or inappropriate behavior by staff
If left unmanaged, these crises WILL spread rapidly through social media marketing platforms — because nothing moves faster than bad news. Failure to manage these crises properly will ruin your public image, directly impacting sales, profits, and business success.
The Importance of a Social Media Crisis Management Plan
Every small business needs a social media crisis management plan regardless of size or industry.
This procedure outlines who does what during a crisis and contains established steps to follow. Such a plan helps you mitigate damage by responding quickly and effectively.
Critical elements of an effective social media crisis management plan include:
Defining a crisis response team
Who are the key internal stakeholders that will make decisions and deliver the response? Typically, this includes social media policy managers, PR and communication spokespersons, customer service, executives, and legal, if necessary.
Monitoring and listening
How will you monitor social media and the web to detect emerging crises in real time? Use social listening tools to track brand mentions, hashtags, negative comments, etc.
Internal communication
How will information flow internally, and how will decisions be made quickly during a crisis? Outline stakeholders, reporting structures, and channels. A comprehensive social media crisis communication plan describes response protocols.
External response strategy
How will you communicate externally across social media and other channels? Have pre-approved templates and policies for social media posts and FAQ pages ready.
Take the PayPal example, for instance. They obviously monitored social media channels (and the stock market) and were ultimately forced to respond. PayPal went through news channels and stated that the notice “went out in error” (which isn’t the best way to face a social media crisis, but at least they responded):
Of course, each type of crisis, or potential crisis, must be assessed on merit.
But having a pre-determined course of action, with go-to stakeholders and a communication system established, means you can respond rapidly and effectively and practice damage control.
Post-crisis review
How will you evaluate the effectiveness of the response, make changes to policies and procedures, and report learnings to stakeholders? Metrics and data should drive your review, particularly with real-world sentiment analysis and ongoing online discussions.
Testing and training
How will you train team members on procedures and test the plan with practice scenarios to identify gaps?
Training team members based on others’ mistakes is ideal here. The fewer social media crises your business experiences, the better. One lesson we can pass on for sure is that failing to act during a social media crisis is THE WORST course of action possible. You must react and manage the crisis; how to best achieve that depends on its nature.
Preparing for a Social Media Crisis
In addition to an emergency response plan, prepare for potential crises proactively:
Establish guidelines on appropriate social media activities for employees.
Train customer service in direct messaging skills for rapid complaint resolution.
Prepare templates for apology statements, status updates, holding statements, etc.
Set up Google Alerts for your brand name, competitors, products, etc., to detect issues early.
Conduct fire drills by simulating a crisis scenario and response. Learn from each practice run.
How To Manage a Social Media Crisis
When a crisis emerges, having a plan allows your business to respond swiftly, decisively, and with the best chance of mitigating the fallout.
This step-by-step process can be a good starting point to help you develop your social media crisis response plan:
1. Assemble your crisis response team
Alert key stakeholders and team members per your plan. Assign responsibilities for investigation, internal coordination, social media response, public relations, leadership approval, etc. Your social team executes your strategy.
Get clear on who needs to approve specific actions. Ensure every stakeholder is aware of the social media crisis plan.
2. Evaluate the situation
Before acting, analyze the scale, facts, sentiment, essential voices, media coverage, and overall impact of the emerging crisis. Categorize the crisis type and determine the level of response needed. Listen for misinformation to spread.
Stick to the facts in your internal information gathering. Responding too early to the market could create more controversy.
3. Get aligned on the next steps
Bring your team together to decide how to respond across all channels, including social media platforms and offline. Draft an official response for leadership approval.
Don’t wing it. Be direct about what action has been taken and the next steps.
4. Respond promptly
Speed is crucial. Once your organization has determined the nature and path forward, post your official response on social media accounts and owned channels. Halt all further scheduled posts if you have them queued up.
Continue monitoring and responding to comments in real time. Inform decision-makers about the volume and sentiment of comments so they understand the growing (or declining) impact.
Often, social media is the start of a brand’s crisis, but it isn’t the end. Consider posting details on your website or blog to add helpful context about the situation.
5. Communicate effectively
Express concern for those affected. Explain how you addressed the issue, take responsibility, and share essential information. Avoid jargon and always remain professional.
For larger brands, this means arming your customer support team with guidance on responding to inbound calls and tickets and means to document or log complaints. This way, agents aren’t in a position to make up answers or inflame the situation due to a recorded call.
An outstanding example of ownership is Slack’s response to their downed systems last year:
Slack took the opportunity to endear itself to its users by thanking them for their patience and sharing part of their own perspective on the issue.
6. Update all relevant channels
Ensure your website, blog, emails, ads, phone messaging, social media channels, and offline locations align with your official response. Update the FAQ pages with information on the crisis.
For example, in 2018, Chipotle voluntarily shut down all locations in response to an E. coli outbreak in its restaurants so it could evaluate and train its team. All communications had a consistent, professional look and feel. And as a result, Chipotle earned back consumer trust and improved its food prep procedures.
7. Continue monitoring sentiment
Keep listening to social media conversations and adjust your responses accordingly. Sentiment analysis can help you track whether the response is improving brand perception.
In Slack’s case, users reacted well to their social media crisis response, and the Slack social media team continued to engage with users on a personal, yet professional, level:
By doing so, Slack’s effective crisis management gave them a chance to improve their affinity with their customer base instead of letting a crisis situation damage their reputation. During a social media crisis, set up a digital “war room” for stakeholders to join and get answers quickly .
Conduct a post-crisis review to determine root causes and learn from successes and missteps. Put updated policies in place to reduce future risk.
Publicly updating policies is an important step in managing a social media crisis.
A recent example is how Zoom responded to allegations of using audio, video, and chat content to train artificial intelligence models without consumer consent:
Addressing the issue head-on is essential in any social media crisis management strategy. The problem must be clarified and addressed so your business controls the narrative.
Crisis Communications Best Practices
Follow these proven PR techniques during the crisis response and post-crisis recovery:
Be quick, transparent, and truthful: Address the crisis proactively and avoid looking like you’re hiding information. Get ahead of the story rather than letting it control the narrative. Provide regular updates.
Show empathy: Acknowledge those affected and what your brand is doing to address concerns. Avoid appearing indifferent.
Apologize sincerely: Take responsibility and don’t blame external factors. “We made a mistake and are working diligently to…” goes a lot further than excuses.
Stick to the facts: Speculating or providing incorrect information creates more headaches. Always verify info before releasing and correct mistakes ASAP.
Bring in experts: Quote leaders, authorities, and specialists like influencers to lend credibility and demonstrate you’re taking it seriously.
Focus on solutions: After the initial response, focus on your corrective actions and how you’re moving forward.
Update messaging: As the situation evolves, so should your narrative. Adjust messaging as new information emerges.
Learn and improve: Demonstrate how the crisis provided learnings you are using to enhance policies and shape future training.
Key Takeaways on Handling Social Media Crises
With social media’s accelerated news cycle, crises can go viral instantly.
Small businesses that prepare can minimize potential damage and maintain trust even under challenging situations. Remember these tips:
Develop a documented social media crisis communication plan for your brand before issues arise.
Monitor social media proactively for early warning signs of emerging crises.
Assemble the response team quickly and objectively evaluate the facts, checking for misinformation.
Respond rapidly with an empathetic, factual, and solution-focused narrative across social media channels led by your communications team.
Continue to monitor, adjust messaging, and communicate transparently until the storm passes. Measure effectiveness using metrics.
Learn from each crisis to improve policies, direct messaging skills, and overall readiness.
With the right mix of preparation and effective real-time execution, your small business can manage social media crises decisively. Stay ahead of problems and let your customers see firsthand how much you care about them, not just in good times but also in bad.
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