Of course this is also valid for unnatural disasters like fires and theft as well. It’s best to be prepared ahead of time if you can for any type of disasters and you may as well take advantage of social media if you have it set up.
You have a storm approaching, like this Frankenstorm as they are calling it, that is about to hit the East Coast, you’ve called as many of your reservations as possible to let them know you are, or may possibly be cancelling their stays for safety reasons. Of course there will always be some that you can’t get in touch with.
How you say, if we are without power, can we update our social media to give guests, potential guests and friends and family updates?
It seems not many people know your Blog (wordpress.com and blogger for example), your Facebook Fan/Business Page and Twitter are all updateable by text message or email. I would suggest since most businesses have answering services to change the message to say, “Please check our Facebook/Blog/Twitter address (and spell it out if needed) for updates” so you can direct people where to go. With the dearth of smart phones or a least phones that you can text from, everyone can take advantage of this.
If you are a business with a personal profile set up as the business, aside from the fact (again) that it’s against Facebook terms of service, keep in mind that users will have to be logged into Facebook to see your updates (emergency or otherwise). The general unlogged in public including Google can not see this. So make sure you have an actual business page set up.
To update your social media in emergencys.
In Facebook, to get to your assigned email address for email or “text to” updates. Go to your fan/business page, go into “edit page”, then “manage permissions”. Then on the left side, click on “mobile” there you will see an email address that if text is sent will post directly to your Facebook Fan/Business page wall.
In twitter, go to https://twitter.com/download and download the mobile app applicable for your phone.
For WordPress.com, go to your dashboard, go to “settings” and then “writing” it will give you instructions on how to set up an email address to send updates to.
For blogger.com, go to your dashboard, go to “settings”, then go to “email and mobile” create an email address to post to.
If you would like to update your Facebook fan/business page, twitter account and optionally a linkedin account as well, at the same time, go to http://buffer.com and create a free account, then go to http://bufferapp.com/guides/email Buffer also has some mobile apps as well for updating.
I hope everyone gets through the storm (and future ones) safely!
Chefforfeng's Weblog 