Using Real-Life Testing to Improve Your Online Crisis Communications

by | Mar 25, 2014 | Crisis Communications

I’m often asked which times are better to tweet and communicate with one’s audience on social media, in a crisis.

 

With tons of studies out there revealing the “best days and times” to tweet and share online, I can see how people get confused and wonder such things for their own crisis communications.

I’m here to tell you to disregard all of the studies, surveys and articles that you’ve read and to ignore all future ones that may come your way.

Why is that, you ask?

Because, as they’re a good starting point for your marketing departments, when it comes to your crisis communications, they simply don’t make any sense.

Every organization’s audience is different, yours included. The only way to have a good, albeit never perfect, understanding of the best times to tweet and share in a crisis, is by testing your audience prior to being in a crisis situation.

By testing I don’t mean to publicly test your crisis communications plan. No! Doing so would only be asking for trouble. I mean to test and monitor your daily shares and online interactions, in order to adapt these tried and tested “best practices for YOUR organization” into your online crisis communications plan.

Related:  6 Rules for Social Media Use Before and During a Crisis

This includes:

  1. Tweet and share your typical social media communications on a daily basis, mixing up the times, systematically
  2. Document and analyze the days and times with the highest engagement, retweets, mentions, shares, comments and traffic to your designated landing pages
  3. Trial and error, getting creative and being consistent will get you the best results
  4. Take your findings and include them as a guideline within your online crisis communications plan
  5. As your online audience increases and trends change, continue to test, analyze, document and update your crisis communications plan as needed

In a crisis, you need to be sure that the right people will be on the other end, receiving your communications and sharing your brand’s message, as much as possible. Understanding YOUR audience, how they interact with your brand and what, when and how you get the most engagement from them, is something that can only be determined with targeted testing and experimenting, over time.

That said, be sure to start testing your social sharing today!