“Haters gonna hate…”

If your business has never had a negative comment online then in our opinion there are only 2 possible reasons. You’re very, very, very lucky OR you’re not putting yourself out there enough online. Unfortunately these days, there are a lot of internet trolls and a lot of entitled people who believe they’re owed the world. This leads to most businesses un-fairly getting negative reviews and comments from people. Some from genuine customers, some that have never even heard about their business until they came to publicly write something negative about them.

As a side note, we got a 4-star review on Facebook last year from someone who’s never spoken to us or used our services. They didn’t leave a comment, just a 4-star review. Why not 5!? Haha!

If you’re doing ads right, you’re ‘gonna’ get some hate!

On the surface of your social media pages, everything should usually look fine and you won’t have much to deal with in the way of negative comments because your fans and followers are your fans and followers for a reason! Plus you’ve probably already banned anyone who’s made a negative comment about you. However, when it comes to your ads you’re hopefully going to be reaching a massive amount of people, which will lead to some negative comments.

Here’s what to do:

The below advice is based on the assumption that the negative comment is genuine and not just someone trolling you. If someone has made a negative comment because they had a bad experience with your product or service then here’s what to do:

1. Don’t delete the comment! As much as you’d love to just sweep it under the rug, you can’t. If they’re just disagreeing with a viewpoint you expressed in your post then leave it. If you don’t want to get into a debate there’s no need to respond. Deleting their comment or banning them may just anger them, and they could come back with a vengeance. If you really, really don’t want people seeing their comment then if it’s on Facebook, you can use the hide comment option. Hide comment means that the commenter and their friends can still see the comment. But anyone not connected with the commenter won’t see the comment.
2. If you want to respond, then do so professionally. If they simply have a different viewpoint to yours then feel free to get into a debate. But keep it friendly and don’t let emotions dictate what you say. If their comment is a complaint then you need to sit down and think about your response. Is there a way to publicly turn their negative experience into a positive one so that everyone else can see how good your customer service is? Is their criticism completely fair to the point that you should admit your fault and promise to do better?
3. If you really feel like you can’t come up with a response that will help the situation then it’s time to ignore it and move on. Make sure you reply to all the reasonable comments and ignore anything that’s unreasonable so that you’re not fueling the trolls.

Tip:

If you’ve built up a great community of happy customers then the best possible outcome is others dealing with this for you. We have seen a few instances where people have made complaints on our client’s ads and others have jumped in to say how they completely disagree and that the seller has been great and they love their products. We get to just sit back and watch happy customers fight our client’s corner!