5 Must-Have Tools to Help You Manage a Social Media Crisis. In this blog post, you’ll find the five tools you need to get you through a social media crisis, along with a foolproof, step-by-step process to manage and survive a brand disaster. Buffer – manage publishing How you communicate during and post-crisis can determine the damage done to your brand. A social media management tool like Buffer comes in handy in times like this. Use Gmail’s Canned Responses or a similar template tool to save time writing the same information out over and over. Your crisis team doesn’t need to be “called in” every time there’s an angry tweet. Set guidelines for how your team will find them. These should include: What tool(s) you’ll use to monitor brand crises Who’s responsible for managing the tool Your ongoing process for crisis monitoring Get these clear now, so that you’re ready if the worst should happen. Create guidelines You may have several people answering questions and complaints on multiple platforms. Be prepared You can’t avoid brand crises.
Nobody wants to deal with crises. They’re not fun. Most of us just avoid thinking about them.
Like paying taxes, it’s always better to be prepared for a crisis before it’s too late. But unlike taxes, crises don’t happen at a given time of the year. They attack whenever they want. So you have to be always on guard.
Luckily, there are tools that’ll help. And it’s best you learn how to use them now, work them into your processes so when you need them, they’re ready to go.
In this blog post, you’ll find the five tools you need to get you through a social media crisis, along with a foolproof, step-by-step process to manage and survive a brand disaster.
5 tools to help you get through a social media disaster
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1. Your smartphone – stay connected on the go
Social media is always on – and in a crisis, you need to be, too. You need to stay connected. At all times.
Your smartphone is where you’ll check in on existing conversations, watch for developments, and keep the rest of your team informed. Make sure it’s always charged, on, and connected to a stable WiFi network.
2. Mention – monitor all conversations
The best time to deal with a marketing or PR crisis is before anyone else knows about it. Of course, that’s unlikely, especially when it involves social media.
To manage social platforms, forums, and news sites, you need more than your regular social media notifications.
You need something that monitors social media mentions, as well as keywords and hashtags anywhere online. You need a full monitoring tool like Mention.
With Mention, you receive alerts for all conversations about your brand in real time, so you’ll never miss a thing. You can also filter mentions by influence and prioritize replies to VIPs who have bigger social followings.
3. Buffer – manage publishing
How you communicate during and post-crisis can determine the damage done to your brand. A social media management tool like Buffer comes in handy in times like this.
You’ll want to be able to:
- Press “pause” on any social marketing campaigns and fun posts to keep the focus on communicating updates.
- Schedule posts for specific times, such as when you’re going to be releasing a formal update.
- Spread posts linking to new information or updates for people who didn’t see it the first time.
Buffer supports all of this and is our marketing team’s favorite scheduler as it’s super easy to use.
4. Slack – communicate with your team
In a fast-moving online crisis, you need a communication tool that can keep up with the speed. You don’t need more headaches finding email threads among newsletters and other distracting correspondence.
Slack– a real-time communication app for teams – is built just for this. You can switch from direct one-on-one messages to group messages seamlessly, create a special channel dedicated to managing the crisis, and attach images, tweets, and media files easily. Push notifications also make it impossible to miss direct messages or @mentions.
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