How Can Busi­nesses Use Twit­ter Dur­ing A PR Crisis

Many busi­nesses could not imag­ine a world with­out Twit­ter, even though it only ar­rived on the scene in 2006.

Whether they use everyone’s favourite mi­cro-blog­ging ser­vice to build brand aware­ness or en­cour­age user en­gage­ment, it has be­come an es­sen­tial tool for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the public.

The in­stant na­ture of tweet­ing makes Twit­ter a par­tic­u­larly ef­fec­tive tool for deal­ing with a PR crisis.

So how can you make good use of Twit­ter when dis­as­ter strikes?

Mon­i­tor Twit­ter for Brand Mentions

Twit­ter is most ef­fec­tive dur­ing a PR cri­sis when you are quick to re­act to the sit­u­a­tion, and this means you should con­stantly mon­i­tor con­ver­sa­tions. The best way to do this is by us­ing a third-party tool to track all men­tions of your brand.

The most ef­fec­tive tools will al­low you to mon­i­tor a range of so­cial net­works, blogs and fo­rums. As soon as you dis­cover a prob­lem, you can then use Twit­ter to pro­vide an in­stant re­ac­tion to help dif­fuse the sit­u­a­tion be­fore it gets out of control.

Ed­u­cate Your Staff on Twit­ter Usage

As men­tioned above, Twit­ter al­lows you to re­act very quickly to any emerg­ing crises.

How­ever, some­times you can shoot your­self in the foot as a di­rect re­sult of this attribute.

Rather than fir­ing off the first tweet that you can think of in re­sponse to the cri­sis, think care­fully about what you are go­ing to say.

In ad­di­tion, en­sure that the re­sponse from your com­pany is uni­fied so that you avoid var­i­ous, some­times con­tra­dic­tory, re­sponses all emerg­ing at the same time.

By mak­ing Twit­ter an in­te­gral part of your cri­sis re­sponse plan, you can en­sure that all of your em­ploy­ees are aware of how it should be used in a cri­sis and when they should not use it at all.

Link to a More In-Depth Response

Twit­ter fa­mously only al­lows 140-char­ac­ter posts, which is not a lot of room to post a de­tailed re­sponse to a crisis.

In­stead, write a more de­tailed post on your blog or web­site, or even film a short video (which can be the most ef­fec­tive type of re­sponse), and then use the in­stant na­ture of Twit­ter to di­rect peo­ple back to this. This is a strat­egy of­ten used by dig­i­tal PR agen­cies and can help to flesh out your response.

Build a Community

Your best weapon when us­ing Twit­ter as a cri­sis re­sponse tool is formed well be­fore any cri­sis emerges.

Take pre­ven­ta­tive ac­tion by build­ing your com­mu­nity on Twit­ter on a grad­ual ba­sis, dur­ing which time you may build up a num­ber of brand ambassadors.

These peo­ple, some­times in­flu­en­tial voices with large com­mu­ni­ties of their own, can help to de­fend your brand and sup­port you when a cri­sis breaks, which can be far more ef­fec­tive than try­ing to de­fend yourself.

Don’t Let Twit­ter Be­come the Cause of the PR Crisis

Twit­ter can be a great way to re­spond to a cri­sis, but don’t for­get that many PR crises have erupted through the plat­form it­self. Make sure you have firm rules and guide­lines in place for your staff gov­ern­ing what they can and can­not post on Twit­ter and all so­cial me­dia channels.

One quick tweet posted with­out think­ing can have huge reper­cus­sions, so be­ware of the neg­a­tive PR im­pli­ca­tions of us­ing Twit­ter as well as the positive.