Social media is a valuable customer contact medium. There are over 3.8 billion people using social media, and it’s useful for sending out notifications, answering customer questions, and more. An experienced social media team can even help your company manage a recall, something outlined by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. How to manage social media during a product recall is essential.
Product Recall Management is a complicated process, and notifying the public is one key part of that.
This article will discuss the role social media plays in the recall process and how businesses can effectively leverage it. Let’s start by explaining how organizations leverage social media in the 2020s.
The Role of Social Media when Conducting a Product Recall
Social media is a way of life, and there’s on end to the platforms you can reach customers on. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, SnapChat, TikTok, and others each have tens to hundreds of millions (or even billions) of users. This makes them powerful places to reach large crowds of people, and marketing dollars soon poured into each of them, giving them power that surpasses traditional media.
When a case goes to court, both parties must be notified of any actions regarding it. This means the courts typically only allow communication in a few ways, such as in-person, via certified mail (signature required), and service by publication in a general circulation newspaper. It’s considered a viable way to spread information. The New York Times is one of the largest newspapers in the world, reaching a total of five million subscribers each month between its digital and print editions.
For comparison, Samsung reaches nearly 160 million of Facebook’s 2.6 billion monthly active users versus just over 17 million following The New York Times. That the brand and publication are both competing on the platform and neither combined reaches even one percent of the total userbase should properly illustrate just to you how widespread and ubiquitous social media has become. It certainly drew the attention of brands across the globe, as both users and brands compete for attention on each other’s timelines.
Social media platforms became the place for food businesses to offer coupons and deals, spread brand information, gauge event/product interest, and more. They’re also places for consumers to discuss personal brand experiences in forums. Good or bad, we saw a lot of customer stories go viral over the years and create long-term impacts on the brand. Wendy’s Twitter account, for example, follows the brand’s long-running “where’s the beef?” slogan by beefing with popular celebrities and branded accounts.
So how can social media be leveraged during a product recall?
Using Social Media for Your Product Recall
As mentioned above, a product recall has a lot of steps involved, and notifying customers is just one part of the process. This means sharing a post across all platforms with all the relevant information about the product, hazard, and remedy. You may not have Samsung’s reach (or even that of the New York Times) but you’ll reach a portion of your most passionate customers. Even if you only have 1000 followers on each platform, it’s still much cheaper to create one post across them all than the cost of sending postcards, making phone calls, and going door-to-door.
This post can even be featured or pinned to the top of your account, and social media networks have powerful targeted marketing features. This means a sponsored post can be created to specifically target customers based on your own data, along with people visiting specified sites or with particular interests, geographic location, and more. It’s one of the most efficient ways to reach your customer base and provide them with:
1. Recall Information
Provide photos and all relevant information regarding the potential hazard. If the product is to be returned, repaired, or destroyed, make that clear immediately in the post, and provide a website link for more detailed information. Consider creating any relevant hashtags or video tutorial content that can make it easier to identify or correct the involved products.
2. Product Information
Also be sure you’re transparent about the product and make any efforts to repair your branding. This means covering all related aspects of the recall and any repairs or replacements that will be made. In the case of food recall management, you’ll want to explain what was contaminated, the nature of the problem, and how your company corrected it.
From a consumer standpoint, you’re often dealing with a low-priced item where profits are generated more by return business. A replacement on a can of corn, for example, pales in comparison to a lifetime supply of corn for generations of a family. If you want to protect your business from the negative impacts of a product recall, contact Mock Recalls to find out how our recall readiness program can help prepare you for all aspects needed to successfully to conduct a product recall.
Optimizing a Product Recall Plan & Recall Readiness
The FDA recently published its final guidance outlining steps companies should take to develop recall policies and procedures that include training, planning, and record-keeping to help significantly reduce the time a recalled product remains on the market.
The FDA guidance describes an array of best practices for creating, testing, and executing a recall plan. Because of the FDA’s heightened expectations, along with the greater risk and complexity involved in today’s recalls, training – including regular mock recall exercises – has become an essential part of the recall preparation process.
It is imperative that your organization plan, train and test for a product recall. This includes developing and executing mock recalls at least twice a year.
More About Mock Recalls
MockRecalls is a mock recall training and consulting program to test your recall readiness. We are purely focused on protecting your product investment by working with you to create a new recall plan or analyze your current recall plan and then put it through a mock recall or recall simulation test to insure you are prepared for a possible product recall. We use our on-demand SaaS based recall management platform that eliminates common mistakes manually conducting recalls, by automating the most tedious steps of a product recall. It is a simple to use platform that just focuses on handling product recalls quickly and efficiently. Through our mock recall trainnig using our dedicated recall platform, companies can improve the recall process, increase response rates, and document and communicate with all stakeholders.
Our program can analyze your company’s readiness in many of the typical elements of the recall process including:
- Initiation, investigation, and communication process
- Recall working team and decision team composition and dynamics
- Team roles and responsibilities
- Process flow and lot traceability
- And retrieval capability and effectiveness checks
Our recall simulation program is conducted as an escalating model using real product facts and potential issues, with multiple inputs such as consumer complaints, social media, FDA/USDA/local health department and law enforcement. Conducting a recall simulation will also allow the recall team and all involved personnel to become familiar with their responsibilities throughout the recall procedure. This gives them time to effectively communicate any concerns about the plan while the company isn’t dealing with the pressure of an actual recall.
Looking to test your product recall readiness with across your organization? MockRecalls will help create and/or test your recall program. Click here to learn more or call us!