Angry Customers Can Be Good for Your Social Media Brand
Unhappy customers and social media can be a disastrous mix. However, with the right strategy, your brand can benefit from negative postings, comments or tweets. Social media is a great outlet for customer interaction with your brand and for this reason, social media generates both positive and negative feedback.
Here are some tips to help you handle the not so fun part of social media for your brand.
You’ve created a tweet highlighting the work your company has done in the community. You are proud to promote the uplifting work in your area but now, someone has gone and written a degrading comment about your company on your post. What can you do?!
Jessica Stillman talks about how you can find a way to make those unhappy customers happy so they can work for you.
First, follow these steps:
- Breathe.
- Ask for specifics.
- Say thanks.
- Identify your values.
These steps will help you further understand the issue that the person has, show your willingness to communicate openly and help craft a response that upholds your company’s priorities. If you can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one, people may promote your company more than if they would have had a positive experience initially.
However, there are times when a negative comment will be just plain wrong. Knowing when to delete a comment means balancing engaging the person who is expressing their dissatisfaction and ignoring them. Usually, you should delete if:
- The comment depicts something illegal.
- The comment uses foul language.
- The comment doesn’t relate at all to your brand.
- The post is insulting another user directly.
- The post is trying to sell something.
(Kevin Allen describes these situations in more detail here.)
Connecting with people in your community via social media can be rewarding and relatively stress free. However, those tense situations when your brand isn’t portrayed in the best light call for a calm demeanor, a problem solving attitude and a little discretion.
Do you have any other customer service tips for handling negative online feedback?
