Handling Negative Online Feedback
Do you dread logging into your social media accounts because of what you might find there in the way of negative comments? No matter how amazing your business or how impartially you promote yourself digitally, there will come a time when you encounter negativity.
Instead of worrying about it, the key to addressing public relations issues like this is to be proactive: have a plan for how you will respond and stick to it. Here’s a crash course on how to manage negative online feedback without losing your mind in the process.
Evaluate the Comment
The first thing to do when you receive negative feedback online is evaluate the post or comment. Is this comment or post negative towards your company or someone else, or is it simply a generally negative comment?
A. General Negative Comment: “Photoshop assisted in this photo.” Or “I hate fly fishing, it’s such a boring sport!”
B. Negative Comment Towards Your Company or Someone Else: “That girl is a Pretendian!” Or “Your company supports cruelty to animals.”
Option A: It’s Simply a Negative Comment
The reality of today’s world is that sometimes people want to use your platform to air any grievances that they may have with the world – this is not necessarily an attack on your business, it is just someone who is unhappy and is taking it out on anyone and everything.
If these grievances are not harmful towards your company or someone else, the best rule of thumb is to ignore the comments and not respond unless you absolutely need to.
Here’s why: Responding to the comment will just escalate the situation and lead to it becoming something bigger than was likely intended. Worst case scenario you could decide to hide the comment (more on that later).
A good example of this would be if you are a maple syrup producer and post a photo of maple syrup and someone comments “I don’t like the taste of maple syrup.” The first question would be who doesn’t love maple syrup? That aside, maybe the commenter is having a bad day, or just genuinely dislikes maple syrup. They’re entitled to their opinion, so let them have their moment and move on.
Option B: The Comment is Negative Towards Your Business or the People You are Promoting
It is common that people who are displeased with your business will drop a comment letting you and everyone else know what they think.
The best approach to this is:
- Address the comment quickly, be apologetic and sincere, and then try to take it off the public-facing areas to discuss it privately.
- “We are very sorry you had that experience. Please send us a private message so that we can resolve this issue.”
- Create a social media strategy that includes standards for responding to all messages, not just negative ones. Your team should establish how fast they need to respond and should draft some templated on-brand messaging.
- It’s crucial when responding to a negative comment to respond factually, whether that means taking responsibility, offering a resolution or countering misinformation.
- You can and should reply to negative comments when someone is expressing concern, but its best to leave provoking comments alone. Replying won’t do any good and will only instigate more.
Note: addressing positive messages should remain as untemplated as possible. This creates a sense of authenticity for your brand and allows for conversations with your followers.
Taking Action: To Hide or to Delete?
If a comment is aggressive, racist, and/or discriminatory to a group of people or an individual, you will need to take action. Here, the rule of thumb remains DON’T ENGAGE. Engagement only fuels people intent on creating conflict.
Fortunately, Meta has built in options for dealing with negativity that require some kind of action. You can hide, delete, and/or report a comment to Meta for review and/or additional action (this last one would be reserved for particularly egregious commenting).
If you have encountered a comment that you have decided must be actioned, the best thing to do is hide it to keep other people from seeing it. IMPORTANT: Do not delete a comment as that can also escalate the situation.
Hiding the comment simply removes it from your page which stops other people from seeing it BUT it does not notify the person who comments that you have taken this action. The person who commented will still be able to see the comment on their feed, making them non-the-wiser. Deleting the comment is often like a call to arms for the commenter.
If someone is being particularly troublesome, spamming your accounts and/or issuing threats or defamatory statements, hide the post to preserve it, but also notify Meta by reporting it.
Did you know? You can set up an automatic setting on your Facebook account that will automatically hide comments that use key words you have banned, or even all comments until you have had a chance to review.
When is Negativity NOT an Issue?
Sometimes people will simply disagree with information that you have shared. For example, cycling in Ontario’s Highlands is always a hot topic for OHTO’s social media pages.
Followers may comment they don’t like a particular route shared in the post and/or prefer a different business or activity. Others will chime in to say their favourite route is the best, actively disagreeing with a previous commenter (yes this has really happened). Entire conversations can ensue.
On the surface this may seem like negativity, but it’s not.
It is simply followers engaging in conversation via your page and it is best for you to stay out of it. The only action you need to take is to monitor what they are talking about to ensure the discussion does not get out of hand. If it does, hide the comment and/or or stop all commenting on that post.
Remember, all engagement on your page increases your page’s ranking with Meta and your ability to market yourself and/or your products. So let them engage!
Tips and Tricks
- OHTO recommends adding a section into your social media strategy on how to deal with negative comments. This can include templates on how to respond to negative comments, as well as noting which topics are highly sensitive to your business.
- The steps to building a template would be to thank them for their comment, accept responsibility and move it off the public platform. Example: “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are incredibly sorry that you had this experience. Please send us a private message so that we can resolve this issue for you.”
- When you are posting a highly sensitive topic that is known to receive a lot of negative feedback/comments (ex. Black History Month) ensure that someone is closely monitoring the post to stay on top of the comments.
- What constitutes a sensitive topic will vary by business (for example, not every business is going to have the same issues with cycling that OHTO’s social accounts have), while there will be a few topics that are sensitive to every company or business (ex. LGBTQIA+)
- When approaching Indigenous topics, it is best to using the guiding principle of “Nothing about us, without us.” This recognizes that importance of Indigenous peoples being involved in the development of initiatives that affect them. A good rule of thumb is to avoid posting about Indigenous peoples without their express consent.
