Being able to identify what could potentially lead to a crisis is important if you want to keep your brand's reputation safe. This also ensures that you maintain a positive and ongoing relationship with your consumers.

When a user heads to social media and posts a complaint or asks for assistance, your brand has a short space of time to respond. The beauty of having a tool such as a reaction list enables a brand to be notified of these types of comments immediately, prompting you to respond within seconds. Impressive! Thus, your brand will always be on top of the ball.

Wondering how this all works? Read on to find out!

Let’s take a look at how to be prepared:

1. Make use of a strategic social media insights system

Having access to a service that keeps its eyes and ears on the ground at all times means you don’t have to. This is essential for any brand whether they are active on social media or not.

Not all brands have a social media presence, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t make use of a tool that helps monitoring online mentions. Having a tool that will still notify your brand when being mentioned online will help you to keep track of any mentions that could potentially lead to a crisis.

Having a strategic social media insights system will allow you to be notified whenever a certain keyword was used or if an author or influencer mentioned your brand. The same goes for when a person posts a comment on your social media posts that has negative sentiment. You will then gain a notification informing you to jump on the situation ASAP.

2. Know who is on what social platform

To be prepared for a social media crisis, you need to have a deeper understanding of which type of person is on each platform. Tools that will assist in making this a lot easier for your brand includes the following:

Who Report — this helps identify potential influencers based on their overall contribution to your brand.

Influencers Discovery — This is done through amaSocial’s Keyword Tracking service. What it does is it shows the Top Author by how often they mention your brand. Once these top authors are identified, the client can filter them according to the amount of followers they have and how often they mention your brand.

By having a clear understanding of who your Top Authors are by brand mentions, you can keep a close eye on them by making use of social media monitoring. Every time that they post content or comment with a certain keyword or your brand's name, you will be notified immediately.

This is a great way to stay on top of mentions online and ensure that you can take control before a potential crisis hits.

3. Have a support team in place

All brands need to ensure that, when a crisis strikes, they have a support team in place. This is because having a group of people with set responsibilities will allow for a quick and efficient response.

So, what exactly is a support team? And what do they do?

A support team is a number of people who have a set responsibilities for when your brand experiences a social media crisis. The team ensures that the crisis is handled in the right manner in order to protect your online reputation and make sure your consumers feel that their concerns are heard. The main goal of a support team is to help ensure that an online mention or comment doesn’t turn into an actual crisis.

The longer a brand waits to deal with a potential crisis, the bigger the chances are for other unhappy consumers to piggyback on complaints from one another.

Being prepared means your team has given thought to potential issues that could arise, and when it does, everyone in the team will know what their core responsibility is. This also ensures that there is no shift in blame if the issue turns into a crisis.

So, what does a successful support team consist of? Let’s take a look:
  • Data management team — Your brands’ support team needs to have dedicated people to analysing and understanding your brand’s data. The reason for this is because there is no use in tracking online data without understanding the story that it tells your brand.
  • Social media experts — Next your support team needs to consist of social media experts. These are the tech-savvy gurus that know the ins and outs of online platforms from how users interact to the technical detail of getting a post to do well. These members are essential to the success of your crisis management plan, as they will know best on how to deal with the issue at hand.
  • Content writers — Having writers as part of your support team will prove to be extremely beneficial when your brand needs to cleverly stitch together words to create the desired response from social media users.
For more information, visit www.amasocial.co.za. You can also follow amaSocial on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

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