From Crisis to Connection: How to Build a Social Media Crisis Management Strategy

Crises of all kinds could hit your brand at any moment. In a fast-paced digital world, having a social media crisis management strategy is crucial.

Social media now plays a fundamental role in crisis management, both as a platform where crises can emerge and as a communication and insights tool to resolve them. Your presence on social has a direct impact on consumer trust–Sprout’s Q1 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey found that 78% of consumers (and 88% of Gen Z) agree a brand’s social media presence impacts whether they trust the brand. An uncontained social media crisis can quickly erode this trust and damage a brand’s equity.

Planning for the worst and being able to adapt quickly no matter what you’re facing is critical. Social media professionals are already well-equipped to deal with communication in difficult situations. Leading with empathy and flexibility is at the core of what you do. Your experience will help you collaborate across functions to develop an effective social media crisis management plan and support your community.

This comprehensive guide to social media crisis communication will give you actionable best practices to:

• Understand the level of crisis you may be experiencing
• Create content that directly speaks to your customers’ needs during a crisis
• Prepare an evergreen crisis communications plan so you’re ready when needed
• Set up your social media operations to see your team through a crisis scenario
• Use social media to make actionable recommendations on business next steps

While we hope you never have to use your social crisis management plan, it’s important to have one ready—whether it’s specific to your brand or a global crisis that changes the way you, and the world, works.

Social media crisis management can be defined in two key ways. First, it involves the specific strategies required to navigate reputational crises that emerge or escalate directly on social media platforms.

Second, it encompasses the integration of social media communication strategies into a broader crisis management plan. This second function works in two ways; as crisis communications, and communications during a crisis.

Crisis communications is a form of brand communication meant to mitigate damage to a brand’s reputation during a negative action or event caused by that brand. A humorous example of this is Reese’s, who launched a Christmas tree-shaped version of their chocolates for the festive season. The shapes were criticised online for not really looking like Christmas trees, which lead their team to start an ad campaign focused on the hashtag #AllTressAreBeautiful

Meanwhile, communications during a crisis refer to communications from a brand during a widespread crisis situation that is bigger than the brand itself. These events are not caused by the brand, but they are likely to have an impact on the brand’s business, operations and community. Social media’s immediacy makes it an indispensable tool for disseminating timely and critical information during such broader crises.

Some of the basics of crisis social media management involve understanding your brand, the surrounding context and the need to be both proactive and reactive.

Remember that not every negative exchange on social is a crisis. However, the practices you put into place can inform how you handle everyday issues and negative feedback—and vice versa. The way you approach controversies can even help curb a crisis or improve your brand by taking in feedback from your community to right a wrong.

A key element of effective social media crisis management is developing a flexible framework to handle unexpected situations. By crafting an evergreen crisis communications plan and team that can be adjusted based on the scenario, you set yourself up for less of a scramble.

Remember: the most important part of social media crisis management isn’t the nature of the problem itself, it’s how you react to it. The way you react to a situation can even turn negative press into positive support in certain situations. A great example of this is Get Baked. They were told they were using “illegal sprinkles” by Trading Standards, and turned this negative claim into a positive brand boost entirely through socials.

During a crisis, you cannot proceed as if it’s business as usual. As a social media professional, it’s crucial that you’re well-informed about your organization’s operations, plans and policies so that, even when things may change hour-to-hour, you are providing clear, empathetic information to your audience.

It’s often helpful to admit accountability in the early stages of a crisis. Using socials to share and promote that you recognise the problem and are working to change gets your response in front of more people, which can help broaden the reach of your early crisis communication efforts.

After a UK chicken distribution shortage made international news, KFC posted an apology on their socials that explained the problem and took accountability. They followed this up with their “FCK” apology campaign, which remains one of the most famous and effective uses of socials to contain a wider crisis.

It’s also important to know your audience. Are they primarily customers? Students? Employees? Local community members? Think about what their questions, concerns and needs are right now. Providing content that speaks directly to these feelings ensures your social presence remains relevant and valuable during a difficult time.

After some recent crises, dating app Bumble used their socials to promote an inclusive statement for change from their CEO.

As you adjust your social crisis management approach, look at any planned content and ad campaigns for the next few weeks. At a minimum, review everything you had planned and decide whether it’s wise to post it now or not.

Combatting social media noise can be its own significant challenge during crisis situations. This noise can involve speculation, misinformation and hundreds (if not thousands) of inbound messages in your social inbox that make it difficult to focus on your official messaging. Sometimes, the most prudent approach after apologising is to temporarily pause all outgoing scheduled content to avoid further complicating the situation or appearing insensitive. Using Sprout Social, you can pause all outgoing content with the Pause All feature in your Publishing Settings.

To efficiently manage an influx of direct messages, use Saved Replies in Sprout. Saved Replies lets you respond to messages faster, through templated responses and defined rules. Combine this with Response classification to categorize, prioritize and filter inbound messages during a crisis.

Employing these strategies can significantly improve your response times and help you maintain control over the narrative on your social media profiles during a crisis.

While social can certainly fuel a crisis, it can also be used to manage one. Social media is a powerful source of inspiration and data that can inform the best approach for your business during a crisis—both in terms of new ideas to serve customers and strategic discussions to have within your organization.

After visionary filmmaker David Lynch passed away, many of his fans were disappointed that no production company had financed him in the eight years since his last film. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos pre-empted some of this potential backlash toward Netflix by posting a heartfelt personal message on his Instagram.

Trending topics on socials—in this case, the passing of a celebrity—can be used to inform your strategy and shape a response.

You can simply search for keywords or hashtags to find examples to inspire your next steps. Or, you can take advantage of advanced social listening tools to evaluate a wide spectrum of global social media messages.

Listening can help you mitigate a crisis by catching it early. AI-powered social listening tools let you dive deeper into comments and messages using sentiment analysis data. Use this data to understand your followers and get ahead of any issues they have with your brand or its messaging.

Most crises brands face start and pick up steam online. It’s important that every level and function of your organization understands the power of social media for managing a crisis.

Here are a few of the main reasons why social media crisis communications are so critical, based on the findings from our Sprout Social Index™ 2025 –

• Social media is where trends and cultural moments happen. The Sprout Social Index™ 2025 found that 93% of consumers expect brands to keep up with online culture.
• Social is where your customers are. 2025 Index data shows 90% of consumers have a Facebook account, 82% have an Instagram profile and 76% are on YouTube; socials are where your customers get their news.
• Social use is growing. 30% of people plan to use social media more in 2025 according toThe Sprout Social Index.
• Brands today are expected to use socials to combat misinformation; 93% of users expect brands to be doing more in this regard than they are already.

These social media strengths can also become weaknesses if brands don’t create content effectively. The increased reach and trust embedded into social platforms mean misfires can seriously impact brands.

The rise of influencer marketing is another important area to mention. Influencer marketing can be very positive for brands across socials, and can be used to effectively communicate during a crisis situation. A great example of this is Tide pods, who were faced with an unexpected surge of people recklessly eating their products in 2018. To help communicate during the crisis they worked with celebrity and influencer Gronk on a successful communications campaign.

Gronk was the perfect influencer for this type of communication as he appealed to the audience of people causing the crisis.

Influencer marketing can however also raise its own issues for brand safety and crisis prevention. Influencers aren’t a direct part of your organization, and you can’t control their behavior. Any controversies caused by an influencer have the potential to also create problems for your brand. Partnerships that haven’t been carefully considered also have the opportunity to backfire. Brands need to be proactive and work quickly if they’re hoping to use influencers to support their crisis comms.

Documenting your organization’s best social media crisis communications practices, response roles and policies will ensure that when something goes awry, your team can swiftly leap into action.

You’ll notice that the crisis management plan template below isn’t limited to social media issues. In the event of a brand crisis, it’s impossible to separate a social media crisis management plan from other communications channels like public relations, internal communications, owned content and investor relations (when applicable). The elements of your communications plan can be scaled up or down to apply to your team and your company’s unique communications approach.

As you work through every possible scenario, consider incorporating these elements into your integrated crisis communications plan.

Create a crisis communications team

Confusion only serves to exacerbate an emergency. Eliminate as much uncertainty as possible by determining in advance who tackles what, who their backups are and who will handle elements of your social media response.

While some crises can be tackled more easily than others—an X post from the wrong account may be less severe than a nationwide product recall—having a robust team in place will allow you to scale your response down if the crisis is less severe.

Craft a plan that includes the following roles:

• CMOs and executives. As these C-suite members work at the very top of your organization, they should be involved during companywide crisis scenarios. They should also give final approval during particularly sensitive situations.
• Head of marketing. Your head of marketing should be championing socials, and social messaging, amongst your C-suite.
• Social media manager. Since they’re in charge of all of your socials, your social media manager should always be on hand to determine your social comms strategy.
• Support roles like Technical Support, Customer Support. It’s important that your social and c-suite team also keep your Support teams informed during a crisis situation. They’re often fixing issues and communicating with customers directly, so need to be closely tied into the process.
• Head of PR. They should work directly with your social team and executives to determine and execute a messaging strategy. They’ll also usually be in charge of dealing with the press.
• Legal counsel: This team member’s role is straightforward—they provide legal advice on communication strategies and the business impact of a given situation, and they approve formal company statements and/or the company’s messaging.
• IT and/or security: This person will coordinate any technology needed to manage the situation and lead the investigation of any physical security issues.

Of course, add other roles or executives from other functions as it applies to your organization. Your plan should include each team member’s name, role, contact information (work and home/personal) and who will serve as a backup if they’re unavailable.

Be sure to have a clear process when it comes to approving posts and flagging certain comments. Sprout’s Message Approval Workflow helps your team collaborate in one place.

Just make sure the necessary permissions are granted to members of your crisis communications team.

Be prepared for different crisis scenarios

It’s impossible to know exactly what crises may come up. That’s why it’s beneficial to you and your company to prepare for different potential crisis scenarios.

Identify what types of scenarios might emerge that could adversely impact your business. List the types of events that could cause each type of crisis, as well as the right member of your executive team to help your crisis communications team leader run point.

Here’s an example of how you might list this information.

Type of crisis: Business reputation

• Major product recall, failure or safety issue
  • Point person: CEO, chief product officer or head of product development for that line of business
• Leak of confidential information
  • Point person: CEO or officer responsible for the relevant area of the business
• Controversial statements by leadership or employee (on social media or elsewhere)
  • Point person: CEO if C-level; CMO or head of communications otherwise
• Offensive social media message posted from brand account
  • Point person: CMO or head of marketing

Consider creating templates for social media posts you can use and adjust for each scenario. Speed is everything when it comes to communicating in a crisis. You don’t have to have all the information yet to put out a post that says, “We are currently investigating and will share more information as soon as we know more.” Brands that wait too long to respond to a crisis, or say nothing at all, appear indifferent or as if they have something to hide.

While crisis scenario planning may not be a pleasant exercise, doing it when your business isn’t at risk will give you one less worry in the event of an incident.

Develop your crisis assessment criteria

The first step in managing a crisis is understanding what happened and the severity of the issue. Include a list of crisis levels and characteristics in your plan to help your team quickly ascertain the appropriate level of response when a crisis arises.

You might assign crisis severity levels ranging from level one (something that attracts very little attention) to level five (something that disrupts business and/or is an international news story).

With this guidance, you can begin any crisis communications response planning by gathering the following information:

• What happened and where?
• When did it happen?
• Who is involved?
• How did it happen?
• What is planned in response?
• How many people does this affect?
• How many people are aware?
• If it happened on socials, which platform was used and which account?
• Is it being shared in the press? If so, how widely?

An offensive X post may only rate a level one and require a smaller team with an appropriately scaled-down response—but if social media alerts you to a dangerous product problem or food poisoning cases from one of your restaurants, you might be ringing the four or five-alarm bell.

List communication and notification steps

In this section of your plan, lay out what the internal chain of communication looks like when you need to activate your plan. Generally, this would begin when a member of your crisis communications team is first informed of a potential crisis. They would notify the crisis communications team leader, and it would continue from there, depending on the type and severity of the situation.

This can also include best practices for how the crisis communications team will stay in touch while managing the situation. For example, establish a daily stand-up meeting and create a temporary Slack channel or Meta Workplace Group that you’ll use for real-time communication.

Get a gut check from your legal team to help you decide. It also helps to map out how you’re going to communicate the situation internally outside of your crisis communication team. Here are several types of common internal communication buckets:

• Informational communications: These give employees context and insight into what is happening.
• Actionable communications: These share next steps needed from employees, from reminders to keep information confidential to reaching out to customers.
• Status update: These give employees an ongoing debrief on what is happening, as the situation unfolds.

Having a point person for employees helps keep conversations focused and reduces the risk of people turning to others or share information they shouldn’t.

Determine account access, policies and procedures

Who has the password to your organization’s X (formerly known as Twitter) account? What’s the two-step verification code for accessing your Instagram natively? Where do you respond if your main communications channels are compromised?

As part of your social media governance model, you want to make sure others can securely have access to your core channels if you’re not able to assist. Build a central repository of policies, procedures and other documentation for an extra layer of security. That way you aren’t relying only on somebody’s memory in a high-pressure situation and you aren’t stalled if you can’t reach a team member.

Get team and leadership buy-in for your plan

The final step of creating a plan is making sure the right people are aware and on board with their roles in managing a crisis. Share your plan with your direct manager and determine the best way to share with your organization’s leadership. Provide a window for feedback and, from there, make sure the plan is housed in an easy-to-access digital location like the policies and procedures section of your company’s intranet, central server or Wiki. Finally, review this plan on an annual basis to ensure your protocols and contact information remain up-to-date.

When it’s time to activate your plan, take a deep breath. Remember, you’re prepared for this—which gives you a strong foundation and clear sense of next steps.

Now, your job is to find a resolution and put your audience at ease. Here’s how to reach that goal.

Remain flexible

A social media crisis communications plan, of course, should cover the most crucial steps, but your team should also feel empowered to take actions that best suit the challenge at hand. Just keep all stakeholders in the loop if you deviate from the established plan.

This flexibility extends to how you handle your scheduled social messages. Many brands have their social posts queued several days or weeks in advance to promote an ongoing campaign or to provide a signal boost to evergreen content. When an emergency hits, turn off any scheduled messages.

Develop a message protocol document

As you work with other communications stakeholders or the rest of your social team to plan your response, an agreed-upon message protocol document will be an invaluable resource.

Focus your social approach on responding to your community’s questions and fostering a sense of connection. Through this approach, you can position your brand as a leader, a pillar of support and source of helpful information—especially for larger, non-brand-specific crises.

This document should outline:

• Your brand’s position, stance or formal response
• Your brand’s messaging strategy
• Approved social media copy to publish
• Approved social media messaging or 1:1 responses

This document should be approved by the crisis communications team leader as well as your company’s legal team as needed. With your message protocol in place, you’ll be ready to communicate with your audience as soon as you get the green light.

Pro tip: Having pre-approved social media copy for FAQs you receive during a crisis—even if a response just includes a snippet of copy and a link to a page that offers more information—is crucial. In Sprout, the Asset Library simplifies collaborative publishing by making all of your pre-approved, go-to answers easy to find.

Set up your social media crisis communications operations

Next, you’ll want to establish your social media management plan and processes. On social, you’ll need to consider several factors:

• How you’ll publish information and which platforms to prioritize
• Communications going out on other channels (e.g. customer emails) and timing
• How you’ll manage and respond to inbound messages
• What language you’ll use in outbound communications
• Whether you will monitor any specific influencers amid the conversation
• How you’ll assess the situation (at the outset and through the end) and provide insights to the rest of your crisis communications team

Choose the right platforms

Depending on the crisis at hand and the field you’re in, different social platforms may be better for distributing your messages. Know where your core audience is—and it may not just be on the biggest platforms.

The social platforms of choice should also make sense for the situation: a fire at one of your facilities may require immediate notification on Facebook, Instagram and X, whereas a response to an insensitive public comment about an employee might require messaging on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Manage and engage with inbound messages

Using the message protocol document you’ve developed, you’ll know what types of messages you can and should respond to. But in order to find all of the relevant messages, you’ll also need to be able to surface posts where people aren’t tagging your brand.

To mitigate major issues before or as they arise, have a solid monitoring process in place. Through active keyword monitoring, you will be alerted of social discussions directly or indirectly involving your organization. In Sprout, the Cases feature will also allow you to flag high-priority comments, questions and posts for other members of your crisis communications team.

In times of crisis, your brand’s inbound message volume will likely surge. Determine what kinds of tools can help you provide swift and appropriate responses to people reaching out. Consider implementing or updating a social media chatbot to help get your community answers and resources as quickly as possible. Just make sure your chatbot is updated to reflect the current situation and questions being asked.

Considering nearly three-quarters of consumers expect a response from brands in less than 24 hours, speed matters. Routing your customers to information on your website, tips to self-diagnose and resolve common customer support issues or information about your company’s current efforts will give your team hours back to spend on more complex queries.

In Sprout Social, setting up Automated Inbox Rules and Auto-Tagging can help you create a Tag-based Inbox View to manage all messages related to the crisis at hand in one place. This will also enable you to quickly pull a Tag Performance Report to share with your team or leadership to give them a sense of the conversation.

Pro tip: If there are specific influencers or accounts you want to flag in the Smart Inbox, configure a Custom VIP List in Sprout’s inbox features. A small icon will appear next to this user’s name and message in Sprout, as it will for accounts with a large audience size that engage with your brand.

Assess big picture insights for company leadership

Use social listening to get a bird’s eye view of the situation, understand the trajectory of the crisis and identify what specific issues are driving negative sentiment.

One of the first things to do is set up a Listening Topic in Sprout or your tool of choice to access insights from aggregate social data. This will enable you to see how fluctuations in the volume of messages and sentiment about the issue, what moments in the social conversation caused inflection points and what specific messaging is or isn’t resonating with your audience.

With social listening, you can quickly export these insights as a report to share with your team and leadership. Doing this at the beginning of a crisis can inform a customer-centric messaging strategy and continuously empower you to adapt as the situation unfolds.

Manage the aftermath

Whether you just went through a small hiccup or a major emergency, you should analyze your long-term audience response and the reaction over time on social. A comprehensive report that shows you impressions, shares, comments and sentiment, as well as internal metrics like average response time to critical questions, will help you to measure your success and outline areas for improvement moving forward.

Ideally, you’ll want to set the dates for what you measure so that you can compare your brand’s baseline performance at a normal time against how data points changed at the beginning, middle and end of a problem.

Major impacts of how a crisis was handled might not show up until much later in the form of decreased revenue or customer loss. But a social savvy organization can track customer sentiment in real time and use analytics to show how well a situation was handled. Remember that your success isn’t just about the numbers—it’s how well you connected with your audience.

After your brand has hopefully mitigated the crisis, you’ll also be able to report on the lifecycle of the situation and how your brand’s response changed the tone of the conversation. These insights will give your crisis communications team information to improve or build on your plan for the future. Just in case.

Crises may feel overwhelming, but just like the best offense is a good defense, taking the time to prepare for emergencies can alleviate a good portion of the stress. With sound strategies in place and the right tools at your side, you’re ready to fight any battle that comes your way.

Hopefully, you will never have to use your crisis communications plan. But if you ever do, it’s better to be ready. Download our brand crisis worksheet to prepare yourself to handle a crisis—before and after it happens.

If you’re ready to try social media management software that will help your team more effectively manage any kind of crisis, start a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social today.