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Social Media is a fantastic arena to have a personal connection with your customers or followers and grow brand loyalty.
Sadly, there are many people who turn to social media to have a rant or a complaint. Even worse, some people victimise individuals and businesses through social media.
The difficult thing with a seeing negative response on social media is that it is far too easy to take it personally and become defensive. Unfortunately, the human brain has a negative default mindset, which means that despite all of the positive feedback you or your business may have received, it is only human to focus on the negative.
Analyse the Negative Response on Social Media
First of all, you need to analyse the negative response on social media. Is it a genuine and legitimate negative response?
If you know that the negative response on social media is a troll (or personal vendetta), this is the ONLY situation where you may decide to delete and block. As a general rule, however, deleting a negative response on social media will only exacerbate the situation, and the next day you could open your account to see something 10 times worse!
When you have identified that this is a customer, rather than a troll, you then need a plan of action in making this good (no matter how wrong you think that the customer is!)
Actions to Avoid
- Delete and Hope for the best – if it can’t be seen it didn’t happen! (Not true!)
- Ignore – Head in the sand approach (More negative comments will probably materialise!)
- Respond with a defensive comment (You will just make your or your company look bad).
- Acknowledge but not resolve – just because you say you will try to do better nest time does’t mean that it is resolved in the customers eyes.
How to Deal with a Negative Social Media Response
- You can apologise for the fact that the customer felt compelled to complain (e.g. I’m sorry that you feel this way, or I’m sorry that this has happened).
- Take it out of the Public Arena i.e Acknowledge the complaint, and explain to the customer that you will make it good. Ask them to inbox their phone number or email address.
- When you have the customers direct contact details, get in touch with them and offer a resolution.
Why the way that you Handle Negative Responses on Social Media is so Important
When a brand receives messages online via Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform, it is pretty much the same as receiving this complaint face to face, and so much be treated with the same seriousness.
Remember that people who complain through social media are already advocates of your brand. They have followed you on Twitter, liked your page and purchased your product. Keep these happy and your brand will flourish, both offline and online!
If you enjoyed this article you might also like to read about facebook individual replies to comments
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