Negativity and toxicity on social networks is something that, unfortunately, is practically inevitable. It is important that businesses and brands know how to deal with them in the right way, because if not, it is possible to trigger a reputational crisis that can even ruin the company.
There are different types of negative messages that can reach a company through the communications channels, and depending on them, it is necessary to respond in one way or another.
Complaints
These negative comments are the most common. However, complaints should not be considered as negative comments, but as constructive criticism that allows the company to improve; and as such, they should be responded to.
Complaints should be responded to quickly, apologizing for the problem or complaint that the customer brought to our attention, and thanking them for their comment and the opportunity to improve that it represents.
Trolls
Trolls are those who post complaints, false negative information, insults or hateful messages, all unfounded. Troll complaints differ from customer complaints in that trolls are not customers, and are complaining simply to hurt the brand. In addition, some trolls are actually bots.
In these cases, the thing to do is not to respond. Pretend they don’t exist and block the accounts you identify as trolls. The worst thing you can do is to answer them and join in, since that is what they are trying to do. To achieve this, they use hurtful messages, scandalous hoaxes or this kind of things; but in spite of all this, you should not answer them, you should ignore them.
Threats
It may happen that someone threatens the company, its work team, managers, or even its customers or followers. This is a very serious matter, and the company that receives these threats should proceed calmly and keep a cool head.
The best thing to do is to never respond to these comments and to first of all take a screenshot of the threatening comments, then block the account, and then pass the screenshots to the social network team to block or delete the account of the threatening person.
In the case of very serious threats, of a personal nature and targeting specific individuals, the company must inform its legal team so that they can take legal action, or bring the matter to the attention of the police or the competent courts. Threats are prohibited on social media platforms and are a crime in the vast majority of countries and should be acted against accordingly.
How to respond?
We have already seen the three most common types of negative messages, and we have explained how to respond to them and how not to respond. But there are times when it is necessary to respond, either to help or resolve doubts or even, sometimes, to respond to insults or accusations. In these cases in which we have no choice but to respond, we must do it in the following way:
Kindness and apologizing
Always respond to complaints or criticisms with absolute kindness, even if the comment made is rude or rude; in these cases, it makes even more sense to be kind, because in this way other users will see that even with rude people we keep calm and maintain good manners.
Also, always apologize, even if a complaint or criticism is unfounded, apologize. It is better to apologize than to argue in a public way.
Humor and sarcasm
It is a good idea to respond with humor to negative comments, especially those that are more hurtful, such as insults or threats. If you respond with the proper sense of humor or sarcasm to these toxic comments, you can ridicule the person who makes them, gain visibility and even more followers if your humorous response goes viral.
But this should not be abused; we should not base our anti-negativity public relations strategy on humor, but on kindness, speed and efficiency. However, from time to time, it can be good to respond to a toxic comment with humor.
Take everything as constructive criticism
As we have already said before when we talked about customer complaints, we must take all negative comments, as far as possible, as constructive criticism that point out the problems of our products or services and that thanks to them we can improve and grow.
For this reason, it is important to thank the users who send us these messages, with formulas such as “thank you for helping us to improve”, “we thank you for your contribution to being better”, “we thank you for your comment, as it allows us to continue improving day by day”.
Helping and solving
And, of course, the priority must be to help. If a customer complains on social networks about a problem or shortcoming that he has detected in our product or service, we must solve it, and as soon as we solve it, talk to him to communicate it publicly, so that everyone can see that we listen to our customers and that we make an effort to please them. This generates a very good brand image, because we externalize the feeling that we are human, close and that we have a lot of empathy towards our customers.
We offer customised PR and digital content services
