How to Create a Social Media Response Plan (Part 1)

Your response plan is so important; we didn't want to squeeze the details into one blog post.  This is the first post in a series that will walk you through the steps of creating your social media response plan.

Social media is a megaphone.  With little time and no cost, people can voice their opinions and share their thoughts about anything.  If someone feels they have been treated unfairly, they are more likely to want to tell other people about it.  This means that anything you do or say to a customer can be shared.  If you treat someone poorly, expect to hear about it in your monitoring.  Assuming you always do the right thing and treat everyone fairly, you still may end up receiving undue negativity.  That is human nature – you can’t make everyone happy all of the time.  The first step is listening.  If you don’t know someone is talking about you, you can’t possibly respond.

Creating Your Social Media Response Plan

The next step is to create a plan that covers who, what, when, how and where.  In our next few blog posts, we’ll cover the steps you can take to create your insurance agency's response plan.  

Step 1: Who Can Respond?  

• Carefully select the right people in your agency. Not everyone on your team is the best person to represent your agency if you are on the defensive.  It needs to be a person with the right role, perhaps a manager, and the right personality.  Someone you can trust to keep a cool head and contact others for help.
• Provide training and practice. Once you've chosen your "first responders" for social media, give them the chance to practice the response plan. Don't force them to practice on real customers! Take examples that other companies have had to deal with - even if they are not in the insurance industry - and walk through how you would want your agency to respond. 
• Identify yourself in your response. Our policy states that the person responding must identify himself or herself, so people can see it is a real person responding, and so that we can keep track of who responds to what.

Our next post will cover Step 2: When will you Respond? 

We want to hear from you - have you assigned people in your agency to be the "first responders"?  How did you prepare them for the role?