Free playbook
The First 24 Hours
A Brand Leader's Playbook for a Social Media Crisis
What to do, hour by hour, when the thing you never wanted to happen happens.
It starts with a single post
It's 3:31 on a Tuesday afternoon. A man with 81.9K followers posts a video: he bit into a screw in his breakfast sandwich, his wife got it on camera, and he tagged the local news. Nobody at the brand knows yet. Everything that matters about the next 24 hours is already in that post.
One of these signals is a complaint. All four together are a countdown.
Inside this playbook
01
Hour 0–1: Detect & Assess
02
Hours 1–2: Determine the Facts
03
Hours 2–6: Notify & Activate
04
Hours 6–24: Monitor & Measure
05
The 10-question readiness self-audit
06
The one-page 24-Hour Checklist
Three questions before you download it
1
Who's reading the conversation, not just the charts?
2
How fast would you know you're about to go viral for all the wrong reasons?
3
Is your data informing decisions, or filling reports?
If any of those made you pause, the playbook is for you.
Written for the people who get the call
Brand, marketing, and communications leaders at multi-location and franchise brands. It's how TwinBear Management, a Social Intelligence Agency, handles the first day of a crisis for some of the biggest brands in the country. In 2025 alone, we identified and handled 12,000+ viral crisis mentions and engaged with 500,000+ mentions and 150,000+ reviews.
Not Just Social Media. Social Intelligence.