How to Handle Negativity Online
Episode description
- Negative feedback occurs when people who have used your product or service and commented about their unhappiness on your social profiles or accounts.
- Spamming and trolling occur when someone decides to target you and your profile with abusive, inappropriate comments.
- How you respond to negative feedback is not the same way you respond to trolls or spammers. These require different approaches.
- Negative feedback requires a response. Reply as quickly as possible and attempt to move the conversation offline.
- There are limited situations in which you should ever hide or delete negative comments or posts. Learn what they are and learn how to handle the rest.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Everyone will encounter negativity online. Remember to never let one person’s awful comments stop you from being the successful person you can be.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
- The many ways you may encounter negativity online – 01:52
- The good thing about negative feedback – 02:39
- Teresa’s own experiences with negativity online – 04:38
- Tactics for responding to negative feedback – 07:11
- Tackling trolls and spammers – 10:06
Transcript below
Hello there, everyone, and thank you so much for joining me on episode number seven of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I am your host,, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I am so glad you decided to come along today and I hope you are having a brilliant week.
I'm really excited about today's episode as I think this is something that most of people are going to be able to relate with that either they have experienced it themselves or they have a fear of it, so, today, I am talking about how to handle negative feedback, and trolls, and spamming online.
Like I said, I'm really excited about this. Maybe excited isn't the right word, but I am excited to share this because I think lots of people are going to experience this. Whether they have directly experienced it themselves, whether it's been some online comments about the business that they work in or manage their social media for, or whether you are lucky enough to never have experienced any negative comments on social media or online, but it worries you, and it worries you about putting yourself out there just in case someone does say or do something.
This is something that I have dealt with myself and, later on in the episode, I'm going to explain what happened and how it feels from a personal point of view because, actually, it's all well and good me telling you what to do in these scenarios, but when it happens to you, I can tell you, it feels a little bit different, and I'm going to talk you through how you can handle this and manage it going forward.
The many ways you may encounter negativity online
Before I dive in on how to handle these situations, I think it's important that we talk about the different types of situations there are, because the big difference between receiving negative feedback and someone, say, spamming or trolling you, so let's start with negative feedback.
If you are a business or a service and you put yourself online and you're on social media, and someone goes onto any of those social media platforms or forums or onto your website through the comments and decides that they're going to put a comment about your business where they have expressed that they're not very happy with the service that they received. They said something about the product wasn't very good or they didn't like the way a member of the staff treated them or whatever it was. This is negative feedback. This isn't spamming and this isn't trolling.
The good thing about negative feedback
Negative feedback should actually...