Managing a social media page is very difficult right now because of the coronavirus pandemic. Literally all brands are affected, no matter the industry. It is really important that you have a strategy in place to respond to the questions that will be related to the coronavirus. Just because they did not appear until now does not mean they will not appear in the future.
Unfortunately, most businesses blindly rely on artificial intelligence on social media right now, with the use of add-ons like chat bots being very popular. The problem is that chat bots were not designed to deal with highly targeted questions, like the ones you will have to deal with in the near future. Chances are, artificial intelligence will only be useful in social media marketing in the following months.
People will want to know what you do to manage the outbreak and protect your employees or business. They want to know that they are safe and what you do to guarantee safety.
Whenever responding on social media to questions that are related to the coronavirus, no matter the correlation, consider the following tips.
Always be honest
Brands that lie will suffer a lot. Honesty and transparency are highly appreciated by people. This is what they want to see. Whenever a question is asked on social media, you need to answer it as honestly as possible.
Brands that do not respond with transparency and honesty will be caught. This is particularly important for smaller businesses because it would be very hard to recover to an image-related problem during this pandemic.
Stay proactive
Many brands started to shut down communications on social media. Managers are afraid and that is completely normal. However, social media is a great channel to use to interact with both current and future clients. This is why you need to adapt your social media strategy to what is happening in the world.
Particular interest should be put on the strategy in the event that the business is in an industry that is highly impacted by the coronavirus, like travel. Flights are canceled and governments from around the world declared that all nonessential travel needs to stop.
Respond to all comments
One of the biggest mistakes you could make on social media these days would be to neglect the negative messages. This is because they allow you to show that you are an honest brand and that you care about customers.
We have to put an emphasis on the growing number of racist comments that appeared on social media in the past few months. Because of the fact that the coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, people from around the world started to attack Chinese people online. Your brand needs to have a zero policy against such comments.
Conclusions
Build your strategy based on core brand values in response to the current coronavirus pandemic. The impact of covid-19 should not be neglected. You need to adapt and you have to talk to the customers you have on social media in a completely honest and transparent way.
