Negative feedback is inevitable on social media. Instead of fearing the moment when your brand is publicly criticized, smart brands plan ahead and are ready to respond. Remember, this is an opportunity to reinforce your stellar customer service and impress potential customers.
How to Respond to Negative Feedback on Social Media
Be Vigilant About Social Listening
Most brands think social listening means monitoring branded hashtags and comments with the brand’s handle tagged. Unfortunately, not everyone is going to be quite so public about addressing a concern. It’s good to monitor all instances of your brand being used online, even without the @ and # symbols. If this sounds like a daunting task, you can employ several services and monitoring tools to help you.
Strive for Short Response Times
Remember that people expect near-instantaneous responses via social media. You are unlikely to have 24-hours to come up with a response to a legitimate concern without things starting to go viral.
“42% of customers who complain on social expect a response within 60 minutes.”
Convince&Convert
This is where having a Crisis Communications Plan is key because you have approved external messaging that you can use to start a conversation while your internal team works on a solution.
Have a Crisis Communications Plan in Place
A Crisis Communications Plan is something you should have, but hope never to need to use. Keeping in mind how quickly customers expect a response, it’s good to have some external messaging prepared that can be customized to the situation at hand. That will buy some time as you start working through your plan.
According to Social Media Today, a good Crisis Communications Plan has the following:
- How you’ll internally communicate what is happening
- How you’ll determine what’s actually a crisis and not simply a disgruntled consumer
- Approval process for what you’ll post on social media
- Pre-approved external messaging
- A link to your social media policy
- Who’ll do what, and when (per department)
To help get you started, Hootsuite has a great blog about how to create a crisis communications plan.
Pause Scheduled Content
Once you’ve defined the difference between a crisis situation and run-of-the-mill complaining, you’ll be able to identify what needs to be addressed. As soon as you find yourself responding to a potential crisis, it’s smart to pause all previously scheduled content from publishing. As you can imagine, there’s nothing more insensitive than a light-hearted post that goes out in the middle of your brand addressing an issue.
Respond Publicly Before Going Private
It’s important that people see you addressing legitimate concerns publicly so that they know you’re aware of the situation and working to resolve it. That said, your brand should quickly move the conversation to a 1:1 format where you can ask for an order number, account ID, etc. to help you resolve the situation. This is particularly tricky in situations that require customer anonymity – think medical practices and HIPPA – where your brand cannot publicly acknowledge its customers.
Know When to Respond and When to Let It Lie
People are going to say negative and critical things all the time, but not all of them require a response. The good news is that if you’re following social listening best practices, you will know when something is out of the ordinary and deserves a red flag. This is when you’ll want to start following your Crisis Communications Plan.
“For negative comments to count as a crisis, there also needs to be potential long-term damage to your brand. Even if a large number of people are posting negatively, it may be best to respond through customer service channels.”
Hootsuite
This also applies to the way you communicate – remember to be patient and avoid getting defensive. If you’ve explored all the appropriate avenues to reach a resolution, and you’re not making any headway, it might be time to refer to your online community terms. You can politely decline to communicate further until all parties are able to abide by the terms.
As a general rule, we have to agree with Hootsuite and recommend avoiding “comments that veer into trolling territory [which are] comments that are racist, sexist, or otherwise aggressively derogatory.”
Be Wary of Deleting Comments
If content is truly inappropriate, there are ways to remove it without actually deleting it. Often, deleting a comment will only further insight the angry customer. Reporting the content as inappropriate will alert the social media platform that they need to step in.
In Conclusion
There are lots of tips to help you navigate responding to negative feedback on social media, but these seven make up our list of best practices. Remember to come up with your brand’s Crisis Communications Plan BEFORE you need to use it so that you can respond quickly and appropriately if and when the time comes. As soon as you recognize a problem – or even a potential problem – pause your scheduled content from publishing so you can focus your brand’s full attention on solving the issue at hand. This is an opportunity to shine and impress customers and potential customers with your exceptional customer service!
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