How to Manage Negative Social Media Comments

Posted March 2, 2017

Every business owner should realize that it’s impossible to please everybody. In the age of social media, it’s impossible for a business or product to not have any negative reviews. Businesses have recognized that engaging with customers is critical in promoting your brand and in boosting customer loyalty. However, what happens if you receive a negative comment?

Here are some tips on how to manage negative social media comments.

Thank them for their opinion

Whether you agree or disagree with what they have written; you should always recognize and thank them for sharing their opinion in the first place. You can always take the higher ground and recognize that it’s fine to agree to disagree on some things. You’re not here to debate with an irate customer, so your response should always be courteous.

Thank them for their opinion and promise to work on improving what caused them to leave a negative review.

Recognize and understand the negative comments. Be humble enough to realize that you’re not perfect and that you can’t please everybody.

Don’t be confrontational

Respond calmly and politely. Don’t be on the offensive. Recognize the problem, and if possible, act on the problem after apologizing for the inconvenience. The last thing you want to do is to engage in a debate for everyone to see. This will make things worse and will not be good for business. The last thing that customers want to see is a business that acts unprofessionally towards an irate or dissatisfied customer.

Apologize and provide a solution

For every negative comment you receive, make sure that you apologize and provide a solution. To properly organize this, you can request your dissatisfied customer to send your business an email with more details about their complaint. Once this is done, you can assign your virtual assistant or virtual secretary to attend to the problem. This is one of the many admin jobs you can assign your social media manager to handle. This makes solving the problem organized and private making sure you leave no customer unattended.

Encourage sending a private message

Probably one of the best ways to deal with a negative comment in social media is to encourage them to talk things out privately. This prevents both parties from unnecessary exchanges or discussions out in the open. By dealing with the problem privately, both parties can focus on the issue without any distractions. This also helps in preventing the problem from growing bigger. Once you request them to send you a private message or email, this ensures that their concern will be attended to and the progress in solving the issue will be monitored. This method is a win-win for both the customer and the business. This is one way of turning a negative into a positive.

Tune them out

Now, this is tricky as you should not ignore legitimate concerns and legitimate negative comments in social media. What you should be ignoring are negative comments that can be labeled as trolling. Don’t allow negative comments that are irrelevant and nonsensical to ruffle your feathers. The general rule is, “do not feed the trolls,” or in other words, don’t reply to them. If you have a witty social media manager who can take calculated risks, they can reply to these rude comments in a witty manner but still in a respectful and professional tone.

Just take note that no matter how great your service or brand is, mistakes and accidents may happen that can lead to irate customers. Look on the bright side of these negative comments in social media and use them to further strengthen your brand. Utilize them to show customers that you deliver a fantastic service and thus gain positive reviews. Ponder on negative constructive criticisms and learn and grow from them.

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