While developing content calendars and meticulously monitoring your brand is essential, it doesn’t necessarily leave you free of drama.
Accidents happen!
Here are to the top 10 ways to restore your social media reputation.
1. Pause & Plan Before Responding
Reacting quickly to your brand’s error, regardless of what it is maybe the wrong way of restoration.
Pause and plan how you’re going to effectively engage the issue and mitigate any further damage.
It is imperative that you engage not only your social media team but also your PR and legal team as you want to be careful about how to respond.
The wrong response could land you in more trouble.
2. Acknowledge Your Mistakes
In most instances, admitting your errors and holding the brand accountable for the issues that arose is the best start to fixing your social media reputation.
When doing so, keep the voice of the post authentic and human.
Being too official will only make you sound robotic in nature – which will come across insincere.
3. Provide Solutions to the Error When Applicable
Often, brands get into trouble with issues pertaining to data, errors, or outages.
While we cannot control everything, communicating solutions and promoting that quickly will help your brand restore its reputation within the social media space.
4. Invest in Social Media Listening Tools
While they may be costly, tools like Radian6 or Sprinklr have features that not only monitor your brand’s name in discussions throughout the web but can also help with tracking people’s sentiment toward your brand.
With this, you’re able to do the research, study the issue, and get ahead of the problem.
If you don’t have the budget to invest in social media listening tools, you still have options.
Here’s a list or either free or somewhat inexpensive listening tools:
- Google Alerts
- Awario
- Tweetdeck
- Agorapulse
- BuzzSumo
- Mention
- SEMrush
- Hootsuite
5. Beat the Search Engines by Developing More Content
One tactic that can help restore your reputation is by beating the SERPs with different content about your brand.
While it can take some time to make this effort effective, it is more of a longer-term strategy that could effectively push down the not so pleasant content regarding your brand.
Create sponsored content or develop a campaign that mentions what value your brand brings to the table are some ways you can start fixing the issue.
6. Take Complaints Offline
Within the social media space, it is a best practice to either utilize direct messenger on native platforms.
You can also create a support account entirely dedicated to social media responses.
Make the email easy for people to remember, like socialmedia@brand.com or socialsupport@brand.com.
If a negative post should pop up, the best thing you can do is, acknowledge the message and ask them to either email you or message you privately.
This is not entirely for the safety of the brand, but also for the safety of the person posting.
Dealing with issues privately will only assist in keeping valuable information such as credit card numbers or even, protected health information away from the public eye.
7. Develop a New Campaign That Speaks to Your Brand’s Benefits (Utilizing Customer Testimonials)
So, the dust has settled a bit since your brand’s social media fail ensued.
Now what?
How about looking inwards at the positives of your brand and highlight them tactfully?
One way to do this is by developing a campaign (it doesn’t have to be a big one) around the value ad or benefits your company brings.
Show and promote the people in your company and how they play an integral role.
This creates more of a human shape of your business.
Customer testimonials are another way you can shed some good light on your brand.
8. Create And/Or Tweak Contingency Plans
Restoring your social media brand is also an opportunity for doing a postmortem after the issue has gone away.
Meet with team members in social media, legal and PR to ascertain what could have been done better and how to prevent complication in the future.
Not reevaluating your contingency response plans will only limit you and perhaps cause a bigger complication.
9. Review Business Operations
If these complaints happen often, and have the same theme, then it’s not the social media or communications team to fix it but rather a business operation problem.
For example, a certain luxury bed company has a good product – but they have a rather terrible tech support.
It’s not that they have poor social media support, but if you wish to have the bed serviced, it is literally either very expensive or impossible to get the tech support you need.
While I am not an expert in the luxury bed space, investing in ways to improve the support that comes with the purchase would definitely create more brand ambassadors.
10. Avoid Being Baited by a Competitor
There are times when a competitor comes into the space and wants to do whatever in their power to further jeopardize your brand.
They will develop content and try to tarnish your brand, but in most cases, the best thing you can do is avoid being a part of that noise.
It will put your brand in a poor light and may legally cause repercussions.
