As a first-class digital agency Surrey, Thunderbolt Digital know that social media is a really valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. However, it can also be a double-edged sword at times, when you come across people using your carefully crafted posts as a forum to be negative or air complaints. It can always be tempting to “bite back” as you might on a personal account, but there is a time and a place for everything, and business social media is not it! Even when users are clearly being difficult or needlessly negative, a certain degree of professionalism is to be expected from company pages and you should always aim to handle negative responses with grace.
One of the first things to do to preserve your brand’s image when handling negative comments is to make sure that you’re in proper control of your accounts, with only employees you trust able to access them. You often see social media mishaps happen from either disgruntled or ignorant employees who don’t know the proper protocol to follow, so it’s best to just keep them away. Instead, confirm that whoever is posting knows what they’re doing – leave it to a trusted social media marketing agency if you must!
You also don’t want to ignore negative comments (no matter how tempting!) – they won’t simply disappear and can cause other customers to lose trust in your brand. Ideally, you should resolve the issue with the customer so that they’ll return, or leave a positive review – if that’s impossible, then you want to ensure that other customers are satisfied that the issue has been dealt with. In short, you’ll need to do a little damage control!
Unfortunately, the user may have made things public by commenting on your posts, but that doesn’t mean things have to stay that way! Airing the dispute out in public is not always the best idea, and before further engaging with negative commenters, you can ask them to direct any complaints to personal messaging to keep the exchange from clogging up your social media posts and drawing more attention to the issue. After all, you want the spotlight to be on your company, not unrelated/negative user comments.
Social media management is in itself a skill that requires a certain amount of practice and patience (hence why so many tend to outsource it to a digital agency Surrey!) so it may take you a while to get the hang of things. For more advice dealing with online negative reviews why not check out our other blogs on the subject?