When Customers Hold your Brand Hostage on Social Media

A customer once tweeted up a storm about how badly a representative of my organization treated him. Tagging our official twitter handle in every tweet, he was sure to state clearly that everyone should boycott our services.

Maybe he was having a bad day or just being mischievous because when we reached out to him, he retracted everything and apologized to the brand. The damage of course was done because he held us up on twitter for about 10 minutes, tweeting untrue stuff about our brand.

Social media empowers both consumers and companies, providing a platform where they can speak to each other in real time. This can however work to the detriment of your organization if not properly managed; the incident above is a case in point.

So what do you do when a customer holds your brand hostage on social media? Here are some thoughts of mine below:

Have an Escalation Plan: Before any crisis or event, have a laid down procedure for dealing with crisis on social media.

Acknowledge the tweet/post: Do not hide from such tweets/posts, acknowledge the tweets in a sincere tone.

Take it Offline: Engage the customer via direct or private messaging to get more details about their issue and their contact details.

Speed up resolution: You want to get that issue solved before someone else jumps on it and gets it even more reach and awareness.

If you are wrong, apologize: It doesn’t make your brand look weak if you acknowledge a mix-up as long as you fix it promptly.

Go the extra mile: Do something a little beyond resolution of the issue if your organization was in the wrong. Include a thoughtful note when delivering that delayed order or have a company personnel make a personal deliver. An apology letter from the company will go a long way to smooth ruffled feathers.

Close the issue out on social media: After all has been resolved, go back to social media and tweet/post at that user expressing happiness their issue was resolved. If you can get them to tweet back an apology, that’ll be even better!

Lastly, don’t take it personally, social media is a platform of expression and many factors influence the emotion of people. Roll with the punches and keep doing a great job.

If you have dealt with social media crisis in the past or witnessed/experienced same, I’d be glad to learn how it was handled from you. Please drop your thoughts below.

Thanks.