Best Practices for Addressing Negative Users on Social Media
Battling some pesky trolls or negative customers on your small business social media profiles? I’ve been there, done that throughout my now near-decade of managing a variety of platforms for small businesses and nonprofits! Trolls and conflicts are unavoidable elements of social media, but fortunately there are some productive best practices for addressing negative users on social media ensuring that you smoothly navigate the issue happening in the present while also equipping your company with the right resources longterm for when it inevitably happens again.
Addressing Negative Users on Social Media
First things first, I want to define the terms I’ll be using to avoid any mixup:
Troll = A person who may or may not have done business with the company in the past. This person can be commonly found intentionally leaving repetitive, negative comment that embody “heckler behavior”, aiming to stir up negative discourse without the desire to provide actual constructive criticism or commentary of value or truth.
Negative Customer = A person who has a grievance that they believe to be rooted in truth, but that has been fact-checked and found to be false by the company. This person can be commonly found leaving 1-star reviews online and blasting their opinion publicly across their own, as well as the company’s social media pages.
While there are also upset/disgruntled customers with validity to their statements, I won’t be addressing those today as they don’t fit within the suggestions I’m going to be making here. The best way to handle someone who has been hurt by your business practices (or staff) is to directly reach out and take the conversation offline. Offer up your phone number and have an upper management employee resolve the conflict. It is worth noting that this approach may be successful with the negative customer type listed above, and has been in various scenarios I’ve managed.
Best Practices for Handling Negative Users
Negative customers = Reach out privately + respond publicly
The most important thing to do when a negative customer is blasting your company over social media is to make a public statement. You may think I’m crazy, but I’m not lying! Getting ahead of a PR nightmare before it blows up is a vital move. Work with upper management to formulate a green-lighted response. Your response should be rooted in facts, firm yet friendly, and should exclude any heated personal emotions. Once you’ve commented in response to the user publicly, the next step is to reach out privately to the user via DM or email/phone call.
Trolls = Hide the comments
A common first step to take on platforms like Facebook that allow you to hide a user’s comments is to do just that. Hiding comments keeps the comment hidden from everyone who will visit your page except the commenter and their friend connections, therefore the individual will not be able to identify that their comment was hidden - this is done in an effort to avoid further conflict without directly addressing the user. If you’ve only received a couple comments and the person has not proven themselves to be an ongoing nuisance, this is the way to go.
Hate speech/danger = Permanently delete the comments
In rare cases, if the comment contains hate speech/harmful content of any kind, the best course of action is to permanently delete the comment and likely ban the user depending on the severity of content. Not only is their behavior against the platform’s code of conduct, it is certainly against your company’s. This is when a company social media policy comes in super handy - I would recommend taking a day or two to have a staff member (or your marketing manager) develop this policy. Decide what type of commentary you will allow on your page and when you will utilize the last resort decision of blocking/banning the user from accessing your page.
Last resort = Block the user
As I mentioned above, blocking the user from your page is a last ditch effort and should always be seen as such. Every individual person is entitled to use their social media profiles however they please and everyone’s threshold for when to block a user is different. I have friends who will block users when they leave the slightest nasty comment, and other friends who don’t have anyone on their block list at all. On my personal social media pages, I just delete the hate comments and move along - or have some fun and respond if it’s juicy! :-) While your marketing manager may be block-happy in their personal life, they should be able to separate work and play, and should ultimately always adhere to your company social media policy when it comes to disciplinary actions. Blocking users on business pages holds a potentially much larger consequence than the user-to-user blocking we’re accustomed to.
Documentation is a necessity
Regardless of the action(s) you choose to take on your small business social media profiles, it is imperative that you create some sort of documentation about the incident. Whether this is a traceable digital conversation between upper management and the marketing manager taking the actions, or a more official typed document that is dated and detailed. I would be weary of relying on a verbal agreement between multiple parties when such a touchy subject is being addressed. At the very least, there should be a text or email exchange about said conflict. In my own work, it is my top priority to receive explicit consent from my client before taking any disciplinary action on behalf of their company, and in my opinion should be a baseline expectation of all marketing consultants and managers.
I’m sorry if you are encountering any negative scenarios on your small business social media profiles, but I hope this post helped provide some guidance to get started. Reach out if you’re looking for an integrity-led marketing manager who can help keep up with the influx of comments and DMs!
