Dealing With Negativity on Social Media

As much as social media is an essential part of your businesses marketing, you should recognise that it isn’t always going to be 100% positive.

Over the past few years customers have started to use these public social media profiles as a way to complain a company – this is not something that you should be ignoring!

An Extension of Your Customer Service

It is important that you see your social media profiles as an extension of your customer service channels. You probably take the correct answering of email and phone call complaints very seriously and social media should not be any different.

Most of your consumers will recognise that mistakes happen and if you deal with their complaint in the right way then you can help to turn around their perception of your company. Of course, it is also worth bearing in mind that social media is very public and if you don’t deal with their complaint correctly then you could end up making things much worse.

Make sure you have in your bio the hours of business that you will be responding to customer service enquiries. That way, if you are unable to reply to someone they know that there is a reason behind it.

When you receive a complaint via your social media channel you should try to deal with it as quickly as possible. If it needs more time to investigate then you need to reassure them that you are dealing with it and will get back to them as soon as possible.

You should look to deal with it with the same efficiency as you would with the rest of your customer service channels.

What About People Not Getting in Touch?

People will generally turn to social media to have a moan, if they haven’t directly sent a message to you.

It is well worth looking at setting up something to monitor your brand mentions on social media. By knowing that someone is talking about your brand, you have the chance to step in and be proactive about dealing with their problem.

If someone complains about your brand indirectly and you step in, take responsibility and ask to sort out the problem even before they have asked for your help then you have the best chance to make sure that this customer is happy!

Abusive Social Media Messages

You will get the odd social media message that goes above and beyond the usual complaints. If these are made on your page then if they’re very abusive you should look to delete it – after all, your other customers do not want to log in and see abuse.

If you have the option you should then private message the person to explain that you don’t accept abuse on your page but that you would be happy to deal with their problem and try to reach a resolution of they let you know the details.

With every complaint and negative comment made on social media you have the chance to turn it around and make it into something positive, as long as you deal with it in the right way and do your best to keep your reputation intact.