Navigating Unwanted Social Media Attention

If you have Social Media, particularly a public profile, chances are you’ve been blasted by spammy comments on your posts, or worse, negative comments or reviews.

First we’ll go through what you should do in the event of negative comments and reviews. We’ve all had that sinking feeling of seeing something bleak written on our Facebook, Google or Instagram, but the question is what do we do about it? Most people think that just ignoring the problem is the best way to go, but the answer couldn’t be more opposite.

Always, always, address it!

It’s always really important to address the complaint. For instance if it is a bad review or a complaint about a service or product that you provide, responding to the comment in a calm and professional manner is a must. If you can, try to avoid getting into a back and forth, let the commenter know that you are happy to have a chat about the problem offline, either over the phone or via personal message, and leave it at that. This shows other visitors to your page that you care about the problem and want to do your best to resolve it.

If it is a comment that is inappropriate and not suitable for public viewing, you can of course delete it and ban the person from your page, however this will not work with reviews.

Turn it into a positive

Sometimes, any publicity is good publicity, and you can turn it around and make it a positive for your business. Take this cafe for example – they managed to turn a 1 star review into raising awareness and booming business!

What about spam comments?

Spam comments are a different kettle of fish – how do you tell what’s a spam comment and what’s a real one? The most common go-to’s for these spammers are usually “Cool content, follow us for more!” Or, “We love your content, message us for promotions!” We know it’s annoying, so here are our best tips on how to navigate them.

• Filter your comments – Go to your account settings > Privacy > Hidden Words. Here you can turn on “Advanced Comment Filtering” to remove certain words or terms. Don’t worry, you won’t miss any legitimate comments because you can still review all your posts and decide if you want them to be visible or not!
• Try to avoid using largely used hashtags – this means you need to do your hashtag research. If you can, avoid hashtags over 10 million in use, and try to use more niche hashtags that relate to your business or post.
• Go through your followers and remove fake accounts – This might seem tedious, but going through and weeding out all of the fake followers will help reduce the spam comments, make sure you block them too, so they can’t come back! Usually if they are following thousands of people but have no posts and no followers, they are fake!

These tips will help to reduce the amount of spam comments you get, but it won’t stop them completely. Our best tip is just to simply remove them as they happen, or ignore them!

If you’re on Social Media, it’s inevitable that you will be faced with unwanted comments or interactions. No matter what, it is always super important to address the problem, try and reach a solution and then put it behind you. As for those spammy comments, delete or ignore, it’s that simple!

If you want to learn more about LinkedIn, check out our blog about Thought Leadership here.

If your brand or business is lacking in social media strategy or direction it might be time to book a 15-minute strategy session to find out how we can support your business growth.