4 ways to manage your brand’s online reputation during silly season

It’s at this time of year where you can really make your professionalism shine through. Social media keeps no office hours. People talk about your brand regardless of the time, location or date. Christmas time just opens up another opportunity for your fans and followers to discuss how empty your stores are, or how slow the accounts department is, or how distant the managers are because they’re not on leave.

Have you thought about how you’ll handle complaints on your social media platforms during this period? Here are a few tips.

1. Ensure that your fans and followers are aware that things will quieten down.

Unless you are running a campaign which is synchronous with this time of year, it’s not really necessary that you flood your platforms with as much content as usual. People understand that it’s the holiday season and that most people are on leave. Personally, my belief is that people won’t expect brand new content every day, but they will expect a reply to a query or complaint they might leave on the page.

2. Prepare a skeleton team to be on standby for queries and complaints

While it’s not necessary to put up fresh content daily, it is absolutely essential that there be someone monitoring your platforms should there be any queries or complaints pertaining to your brand. Ensure that there will be at least one person checking the platforms a few times a day to monitor for anything that requires an immediate response.

3. Put a support system in place during this period

It’s no good having one poor soul monitoring your platforms if that person doesn’t have a support system to go to when needing answers. Make sure there is a list of people to contact for relevant queries and, more importantly, that those people are available by phone or email when necessary.

4. At the very least, leave contact details up where everyone can see them

Whether you have a team on standby or not this December make sure that, on your platforms, there is at least one contact number and email address for consumers to use in order to sort out queries or complaints. On Facebook and Twitter I would recommend leaving these in your bio’s.

It is vitally important that your brand’s social media presence does not go on holiday with you. You will come back to a page that is full of spam, hate speech and furious consumers. Rather implement a security blanket that will keep your fans and followers warm and fuzzy over the December period so that you don’t have to come back and do damage control.