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How to Deal With Negative Comments on Social Media [+ Examples]

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While brand-bashing is nothing new, the internet and social media platforms make the comments from these meanies even more lasting and impressionable.

And because some social networks like Yelp and Twitter make it easy for people to set up fake profiles, the anonymity that people can achieve on the internet makes some more comfortable with losing all sense of decency, respect, and good manners.

So what’s the best way to deal with the negative comments that crop up from time to time? Let’s find out.

Let’s discuss these strategies in detail.

1. Respond to the comment as soon as possible.

Don’t delay. Don’t let negative comments linger. The more time you let them go unanswered, the more time others have to see that someone has complained and you haven’t responded.

Instead, address negative comments as quickly as possible to prevent them from bubbling up into something potentially more damaging. A negative post on your Instagram post or a tweet at your company’s Twitter account, for example, is much less of an issue than a nasty blog post, which can have a much longer-lasting effect.

Responding quickly will show the naysayer you’re listening, and you care. It will also alert others of your dedication to your community members.

2. Be apologetic.

If someone is complaining about your products, services, or anything else, say you’re sorry. It doesn’t matter if their complaint is warranted or not; you’re better off taking the “customer is always right” approach.

It doesn’t make sense to get in a public cage match over just one complaint, and others will respect you for apologizing upfront. If the person you’re dealing with is complaining over something silly, others will realize that, too, and won’t think anything of it.

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3. Discuss the problem privately.

React publicly first, then take it privately. For example, if someone is being particularly difficult, take your communication with them to a private channel.

First respond publicly, whether it’s via a tweet or a comment on their Facebook wall post, and then send them a private message so you can chat with them over email or the phone, explaining to them you’d like to discuss the matter in a way that offers them a more personal experience.

This way, you give them the attention they’re vying for without making your interaction public for all to see.

4. Appreciate their feedback.

Treat complaints as constructive criticism or feedback. Sometimes that’s all they are. People want to be heard, and they want to know they’ve been heard.

So after you’ve apologized for their unsatisfactory experience, let them know their feedback is appreciated and that you’ll seriously consider their suggestions for improvement.

Then actually follow through. Send their feedback to your product team or the appropriate person within your organization. By responding to negative feedback, you can turn angry customers into happy, loyal ambassadors.

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5. Ask them how you can help, and help.

If the comment you’re dealing with is blatantly offensive and lacks context, tell the commenter you’re sorry they feel the way they do and ask them how you can help make the situation better.

Then, one of two things will happen: They’ll reply with something you can actionably deal with, or they’ll be so taken aback that you replied and have nothing more to say. Either way, you’ll have responded tactfully.

6. Don’t delete all negative comments.

There are some times when it’s fine to delete negative comments. For example, if they use offensive language or are commenting off-point, there’s no danger in deleting the comments.

However, if they have genuine complaints, deleting their comments is a huge mistake. Those with legitimate complaints can be incensed by your censoring, and remember, current and potential customers are also watching. If you delete their comments, it’ll look like you’re hiding something which isn’t good for your brand.

7. Pick your battles.

Some people make noise just for the sake of making noise. They’re attention-seekers, and they just want to stir up some controversy.

It’s important to decide what’s worth responding to. Does this person have a following? Are other people responding to what they’re saying? It’s essential to keep these people on your radar and monitor what they’re saying, but it might not always be worth engaging with them.

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Here’s what each type means and tips on how to handle them.

1. Customer Complaints

These are the most common negative comments you’ll receive and the most important of the four. As the name indicates, these comments are from customers that have problems using your product or service.

How to respond to complaints:

You should respond swiftly to all customer complaints. Apologize for any inconvenience, verify the problem, and offer customers a solution.

2. Trolling

Trolls are the bane of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. These people (or robots?) just want attention and cause problems for you. Their outrageous comments are oftentimes untrue and intend to get other people riled up. This, in turn, detracts from your social media posts and redirects attention onto themselves and their ridiculous comments. Unfortunately, they aren’t genuine customers with real complaints and are pretty annoying.

How to deal with trolls:

Engaging them might be your first reaction, but that’s exactly what they want. So, once trolling has been identified, ignore the comments altogether.

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3. Malicious Comments

Comments that contain profanity and offensive language fall into this category. This goes a bit further than trolling – malicious comments are mean and insulting and may attack your brand or the character of your staff or leadership. The intent of malicious comments is to inflict emotional distress on your team.

How to deal with malicious comments:

Have clear rules of engagement and enforce these rules. For example, you can have a “no profanity” rule and enforce it by deleting any comments that contain them. Repeat offenders can be reported and blocked.

4. Threatening Comments

These comments harass or threaten your social media team, leadership, or staff. They may even target customers and other followers of your social media accounts. Threatening comments are typically violent in nature — physically, emotionally, or otherwise.

How to deal with threatening comments:

You may be tempted to respond to threatening comments by sharing your boundaries as a brand or even informing the commenter about the terms of use of the social media platform, but it’s best to refrain from engaging. Hide the comment if you can, then, screenshot the comment and report it to the social media platform, local authorities, and your legal team.

Snappy Responses Wins The Battle, But Kindness Wins The War

It may feel good in the moment to make a snarky comeback and put a troll or negative person in their place. But the majority of the time, it’s just not worth it to respond.

You can stay on top of negative comments on your social media pages by using the tips we’ve provided in this post. You can also create a social media crisis management plan to help you turn nasty comments into positive PR.

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Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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