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Learn which marketing opportunities you need to seize in 2025. Watch now Thanks to the real-time nature of various channels, many stakeholders turn directly to social media in times of crisis. Where does the crisis arise and how do you deal with it? How do you ensure that crisis management is in order for your organization? After reading this article, you will be able to prepare your organization down to the last detail!
When a crisis breaks out, it is important to know what is happening around your organization. Social media are both an important source of information to map the spread of news, as well as an important source to provide information.
Different types of social media crises in a row
Social media is an outlet for many and a message can quickly lead to a reputation crisis for your brand or organization. To know how to deal with these crises, you first need to know where they come from. For example, we see social media as an important source of information during crises in the 'real world', think for example of the fire in the Notre Dame last week, but social media can also be a source for news media.
Ongoing discussions about customer service, product quality and employee dissatisfaction are picked up by mainstream media such as Kassa, Radar and Keuringsdienst van Waarde. Or we see memes, internet jokes that spread like wildfire, leading to parliamentary questions and a statement from politics. Think for example of the farewell day of Sylvana Simons , which started with an event on Facebook.
This is how you recognize a crisis
To ensure that alarm bells don't go off at every opportunity, it's useful to know when a crisis is occurring. From an online reputation management perspective, this means: how do we recognize the early stages of a crisis that is emerging on social media? The following points will help you identify a crisis.
Change in volume
There is a noticeable change in volume around your organization measurable. In practice this often means an country email list increase of at least 200% to 300% in a short period of time. A social media monitoring tool can be set up so that you receive alerts for this and are informed quickly.
Change in sentiment
A sudden increase in negative news can be an indication that a crisis may be brewing.
Issues and stakeholders
A group of stakeholders is talking about your organization or a relevant and important topic on social media. It is therefore important to also monitor issues and stakeholders from the industry.
An information leak
Internally sensitive information that unexpectedly comes out. It could be that there is an information leak within the organization or a talkative employee.
A certain source picks up an item. For example, an article in which your organization is combined with pollution or poor employee policy.
A social media crisis is in sight. Now what?!
Step one is to be able to recognize through monitoring when a crisis may be coming. What's next? Step two is to try to avert the crisis. Use the following 8 tips as a tool to get the crisis under control:
