Defending Your Company on Social Media

Many good things come out of social media. It has become popular in the business community to engage with customers and increase brand recognition. Along with its popularity and the exposure and reach it provides many businesses, social media can sometimes cross over from professional to personal. This occurrence often forces companies to seek out methods to control their branding and messaging in ways that promote their company favorably.

For instance, every business has encountered a disgruntled employee or customer at some point. But when that displeasure results in negative feedback posted about you or your business on social media, you must be prepared to handle it and defend your business moving forward.

When creating a social media management strategy, regardless of whether you are dealing with positive or negative feedback, make sure you manage the audience viewing your online profiles. According to a Salesforce survey, the average consumer uses 10 different online channels when looking for or communicating with businesses. Your social media profiles are today’s Yellow Pages, and it is essential to understand how other companies and competitors offer their products and services through social media.

The first step is critical to build and maintain a social media policy for your business. This will create awareness, align strategies, hold users accountable, and help to shape and deliver the message you want to send potential new clients. Take a look at the following concerns to learn how your business can reassess and support its online presence with a smarter, safer social media strategy.

Crisis Planning

One vital part of a social media strategy is establishing a crisis plan — a way to handle difficult conversations with other social media users, and respond to negative reviews. Technology can’t defend you from bad reviews, so developing a plan is essential to the success of your crisis response. The key to resolving any controversy is to be honest and, most importantly, to not add fuel to the fire by trying to overexplain a lousy situation.

Stick to the facts, address the real problem, provide a solution, and limit participants to only those who need to be involved. Some inappropriate posts are made by accident, but news travels fast, and it’s best to stay on top of situations like these. A combination of policies, technology and oversight can protect you and increase your social media awareness.

Social Listening Programs

How can a stakeholder keep up with and manage a company’s social media presence? Social listening is a basic way to keep track of what is being shared about your organization online. Some of the critical features of social listening software include flexible queries that help to improve results; reports that outline who is talking about your brand, competitors or industry; Twitter, Facebook, Indeed and LinkedIn filters that search for negative keywords and demographic data, which could include the interests, occupations and locations of those in your audience. Social listening tools can also direct people who are searching for information about your company to positive feedback.

Account Access & Safety

Often, a business’s social media posts can be misused by employees, posting proprietary data or sharing information that would not ordinarily be made public from a business perspective. To raise social media awareness among your employees, consider the following steps.

• Limit employee access to social media accounts. To cut down on misinformation, phishing and disgruntled posting, lock your social media feeds so that no post goes live until it is reviewed.

• Train the employees who post on behalf of the company about your organization’s specific policies and what constitutes appropriate use.

• Employees who handle your social accounts and represent the company should be sufficiently trained on how to identify, mitigate and prevent an attack on any social media platform.

• Change your account passwords regularly, especially with regard to changes in personnel.

In today’s world, it is essential to maintain a social media presence to have constant communication with the people who are interested in your company and its products and services. Positive and negative posts alike, it is essential to be consistent in your response. Make sure you handle all complaints the same way you would if the individual was standing in front of you.

Establishing Best Practices

Establishing best practices is a key step in building a successful strategy and developing policies to manage that strategy.

Keep in mind that your company should have a designated group of people working together to manage your business’s various social accounts. The same individuals should not only review comments and respond in a timely manner, but also take time to discuss any difficult scenarios and determine whether the response to those conflicts should be publicly or privately.

Social media is public in nature. It moves fast and can quickly escalate a situation, especially when the feedback is negative. Avoid the kneejerk reaction to immediately remove the inappropriate or negative post(s) from social media — this approach may only complicate the issue. Honest communication with the displeased party is a much more straightforward way to manage and mitigate the damage that can result from these posts.

From a Legal Perspective

Remember: Documentation is king. Save everything, take screenshots of all heightened social media communications, especially if the comments are accusatory or derogatory. Should things reach a point of escalation where the problem is brought to litigation, this documented correspondence could be the difference between winning and losing in court.

This also means you need to meter your online reaction to the post. While, in most cases, you should not delete a post, in some cases, from a legal perspective, not responding is the best course of action. Any responses could be used against you in a court setting, so, if you respond, demonstrate the proper sympathy or empathy to the issue, along with suggestions for how to rectify the situation to their satisfaction.

Considering some of the legal ramifications of social media and the written word, try to avoid putting yourself in a situation where you could make a bad situation worse by having it unfold in public. It is essential that when responding, you follow a couple of basic rules. First, never blatantly attack in a manner that is rude and outrageous; you could amplify the problem by inadvertently involving others who follow your social media feeds, exponentially expanding the argument. Be cautious of known social media users whose sole purpose in posting is to taunt or provoke. These “trolls” are often looking for a fight, and your response could interject a stranger with no skin in the game into your argument. Don’t put yourself in a position where you might lose control — this could lead you to say something that could come back to get you in court.

Managing and monitoring social media can be difficult, but the reality is that you can’t stop people from posting negatively about you or your company. This is why it is essential to monitor social media and be responsive and proactive. Don’t forget to weigh the value of your response — sometimes silence says more about the poster than it does about you.