The unmatchable speed at which social media is growing breeds a lot of curiosity amongst many marketers. Social media content can indeed be an unrivaled way of directly connecting with your audience, but it also opens up a way to negative comments, objections, and criticism. One complaint or negative comment can quickly gain momentum to put your brand’s image at risk and can have a negative effect on your consumer base and prospects.
While 95% of social media posts fuel the 1:1 communication process, it is crucial to understand the reason behind any positive or negative comment because any which way, these things build and destroy any brand’s reputation. One lousy tweet or an Instagram comment can have a dangerous impact on your users’ thought process, and will also make you stand out among your competitors and capture customers’ attention.
Thus, to build perpetual trust among customers and even prospects, it is essential to build a quality framework on how your brand should be responding to negative feedback— before it snowballs into a full-blown argument. Here are the top seven tips for every brand and social media marketer on how to smartly handle witty comments.
- Never Respond Negatively: Brands can cool down the heated environment by responding helpfully and with full positivity. Never respond to comment negatively or even defensively. Respond empathetically, and your reply should make your customer feel listened to. Don’t be afraid to apologize for the inconvenience caused to your customer. Your negative or positive comment will be read by other people and can certainly make a huge impact.
- Don’t Lose Your Patience: While being in any business, it is impossible to please and satisfy every customer of yours; and this is a brutal reality. No matter how hard you and your team try to put forward the best content, there would be quite a few people who will despise it. But there’ll be happy customers too 🙂 . Thus, irrespective of how untrue or detrimental the review is, you should never lose your patience and respond as politely as you can. Enraging over a review will only turn your blood pressure high, but responding helpfully can show your compassion towards your customer.
- Consider the Intent of the Message: There are times when we cannot judge the comment as negative or positive or maybe neutral. Responding without understanding the intent can heat up the situation. So, the best approach is to first understand the intention behind the feedback and then respond. Find out whether the writer is happy, sarcastic, enraged, confused, emotional, or frustrated. Once you ace this puzzle, the perfect reply will flow automatically.
- Avoid Generic Replies: Copying and pasting a generic text will never help. Responding like “We understand your concern and we will look into the issue.” can only irritate your customer even more. So, try giving the accurate reply that is helpful and solves the issue, if possible. If not, then connect with the customer personally.
- Add a Pinch of Humour: Why reply with the boring generic texts all the time when you can add a pinch of humor in your conversation? If you’re good at humorous writing, or your co-worker is, use it as an advantage and diffuse a tense situation with it. A witty reply can not only make your customer smile but can also build an exceptional brand image.
- Response time matters: Response time matters a lot, and everyone expects prompt replies. When it comes to sensitive issues, a slow reply can leave a customer infuriated and ignored. Try to respond within 30 minutes and handle the situation quickly.
- Take It Offline: Even when we respond with perfect replies, the customer may still feel unsatisfied. To handle the situation smartly at that time, it is better to take another step by talking to him/her personally. Ask for the contact details and call the person for a better solution. This effort might not be worthwhile but will undoubtedly show your empathy towards your customers.
To close the loop in the public eye, make sure to follow up publicly that the issue was resolved. Take notice of the feedback, own your responses, and let the customer know that you care for them.
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