How to deal with social media crisis

A social media crisis can occur in many ways. It can be where a bunch of trolls attack your profile, where many people complain on it, where people start linking it with negative things, and many other PR and personal crises.

Below are several tactics that you can try independently, and some that you may be able to try together or one after another. The tactics on this article do not cover if your social media profile if shut down, hacked or infected.

Tactic 1 - Ignore it

You can just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. It happens all the time. You can make a problem worse by acknowledging it. Many times these crises will die off as quickly as they appear. Social media and its participants are very fickle and will move on to the next “thing” as soon as that thing becomes mildly more interesting than the crisis you are facing.

Tactic 2 - Start anew

If the poop has hit the fan and everything is ruined, you can just close down your social media profile(s) and start a new one(s). There is nothing stopping you from starting afresh. There are many social media profiles that do not allow you to re-sign up with the same email address, or if they do, they still attach your old profile to it. But, even if you cannot resign up with the same email address, you can always start a new email address. They are free and it is very easy to get a free one.

Tactic 3 - Apologize and move on

If you apologize then you acknowledge (see above), which can sometimes make the problem last longer. If you acknowledge a problem then you show people that their claims or complaints are valid. If you apologize then it may appease some people, especially if they feel you are being arrogant about it, but apologizing may also encourage some people to take the high ground and they will continue spitting on you from what they consider to be a lofty moral position.

Tactic 4 - Apologize until the crisis is over (very risky)

There are some people that have done this and it has turned into a disaster. The more they apologize, then the more “wrong” people assume they are. It also encourages people to continue attacking because some people like to get others to apologize. They feel that if another person apologizes, then they themselves are right because the apologetic party is wrong.

Tactic 5 - Start a positive PR campaign to bury the negative PR

This happens all the time, especially when a company gets a bad online reputation. They plaster the Internet with positive content so that it is harder to find negative content. You can do a similar thing on social media. You can plaster your profile with so much positive content that the negative content is swamped and harder to find. It also pushes things further down your timeline where people are less likely to look.

Tactic 6 - Create a place for people to vent and start deleting negative posts

This is another clever trick that is used to repair an online reputation and a similar thing may be done with social media. Let’s say you have a really terrible service, so you start a website or two where people may complain about you. You do this under a different name so that the people contributing do not know you are behind it. As you have your crisis, you will find people adding negative content to the website.

You may then start slowly deleting and/or changing it to positive content. Or, you can wait until the fuss dies down and then take down the complaint website(s). The point of this is to create a place where the negative PR collects. It is better that it collects in an area that you can control so you can remove it later. If you do not do this, then the negative press/PR will spread onto numerous websites and your negative online reputation will be there for a lot longer. Similar principles apply on social media and a similar tactic may be used.

Tactic 7 - Stand behind your decision

If you made a decision and it is unpopular or causing problems, then you can simply stand by that decision. Just because it caused a crisis on your social media profiles does not make it wrong. You can simply stand by your decision and ride out the negative backlash on your social media profiles.

Tactic 8 - Stand behind your mistake and say you learned from it

Instead of apologizing and trying to make amends, you can simply make it clear that you know you made a mistake and that you have learned from it. You can spin the mistake into a learning experience that has improved either you or your business.

Author Bio:
Kiara is a blogger, writer, networking enthusiast. Currently she writes for emergencyessays. Today Kiara is eager to share her experience of work in the sphere of social media.