Protecting Your Facebook Page: How to Handle Negative Comments

With a third of adults now posting on Facebook and Twitter, many businesses are seeing the importance of social media and creating business Facebook pages. These pages help to create awareness with customers and allow businesses to communicate daily with their fans, but once you have your page up and running, there are a few bumps you may hit in the Facebook road.

Some of these bumps include comments from unsatisfied customers and fans who spam your page with rude or irrelevant posts. You must address these issues quickly, and here are some tricks that I have found work well.

Some view unsatisfied customer comments as a hazard, but I view them as a blessing! I am so lucky to have that customer tell me directly about their experiences and allow me the opportunity to correct them, as opposed to just vent about it to their friends and family, and sometimes the entire Internet! If a company can fix the situation or sometimes just apologize, that customer is more likely to have a positive view of the company.

When you get that customer complaint post, here is what you should do:

1. Make sure to apologize and thank them for sharing the information in a timely manner. Ideally, you should be checking your Facebook page at least once a day. If the comment sits on your wall for a week with no response, it may irritate the customer even more and make your business look unprofessional to the other fans.

2. Attempt to fix the situation or explain what you are going to do to prevent that same situation from happening in the future. It may be wise to ask the customer to email the details of their experience. This just keeps more unflattering comments off your wall, and allows you to continue the conversation privately with the customer.

3. Continue to monitor the comment and keep in touch with the customer until they are satisfied with the situation.

When your Facebook page hits a certain number of fans, you will eventually start to attract some spammers. Some may just post links to their sites, and some may post rude or obscene comments. Either way, you must deal with these quickly.

1. If the post could be offensive to your other fans, immediately delete the post. You can do this by clicking the “delete” link under the comment.

2. If the post is not too offensive, you can try to reach out to the poster and remind them that other fans read the wall and to keep their comments PG rated, or whatever is acceptable for your page. It also helps to have a “policy” outlined on your page discussing what is considered unacceptable content and noting that if it is posted, it will be removed.

3. Some spammers will not stop. In this case, you should report them to Facebook. To report a spammer, just click on the “report” link under the comment. This is sometimes the only way to protect your page and your fans.

Do you have any tips for dealing with rude or obscene posts? Have you ever had to report anyone?