5 Tips On Dealing With Complaints on Social Media

“If everybody just ‘likes’ you, nobody loves you.” – Jerry Potter, Five Minute Social Media

How do you deal with complaints on social media? We’re going to break down dealing with this from actual customers, legitimate complaints, as well as when you get those delightful random strangers and haters. Unless you believe the entire internet loves you and always will, I’d consider this a must read. 

If everybody just ‘likes’ you, nobody loves you. The fact is, the bigger you get, the more complaints you’re going to get. More people equals more passion, and with more passion the more likely somebody is not going to like you – and that’s okay. 

Complaints are not all personal, sometimes they come from a place of true user frustration. In some cases, if somebody does complain, it is great feedback for your business. I’ve had people bring something up and my reaction is, “I didn’t even know that was the experience you were having within my business, thanks.” Another reason complaints can be good is when you reply to the complaint, it can display how great you are as a business or a business owner at listening and dealing with customer complaints for other potential customers. 

Here are my five tips for dealing with complaints on social media. 

1. READ IT AGAIN & BREATHE. Actually read the review or the complaint at least twice. When I was doing reputation management for a lot of companies, time was my enemy so I would just read through a bad review and instantly start to reply. Then I would look back at the review to reference something and realize, “Oh, that’s not what they were complaining about at all.” Whoops. So read the review or complaint at least twice to make sure you really understand it. 

2. IS IT TRUE? Think about why the complaint happened. Is it a legitimate complaint? For example, after seeing a bad review on a venue, I’d contact the manager and they would explain, “Yeah, we had a big issue that day.” Mystery solved. So then that’s a legitimate complaint. Is it a legitimate complaint or is it just somebody complaining in order to complain? Is it somebody complaining because they’re having a bad day? Is it somebody complaining because they’ve decided to troll you? I always remind myself that I have no idea what else was going on in this customer’s life when they decided to complain.

3. KEEP IT PRIVATE. Plan your public and private reply. Anytime you are commenting on a public post, comments, a review – anything that other people are going to see – you are really responding for the general public. Keep that in mind when you’re deciding how to reply. And then you also want to plan your private reply. Take the conversation private as soon as possible because you don’t know what the person’s going to say once a conversation has begun. On a Facebook business page, if somebody leaves a review, you can actually send them a private message. “Hey, I’m so sorry that happened. I want to look into it and figure out how to make sure this doesn’t happen again and make it right. I’m going to send you a private message.” That’s how you’d reply publicly. Then you would send the person the private message and try and find out more. It’s also always good to give the customer an expectation of when you will get back to them. 

4. NOT A ROBOT. Be a human and show empathy. Empathy goes so far. “I’m so sorry that that happened. Or, “I’m so sorry that you had that experience.” However, don’t necessarily admit fault, you don’t know the facts yet. If someone says, “Hey, I ate at your restaurant and I got food poisoning. You don’t want to reply, “I’m so sorry, you got food poisoning because you ate at my restaurant.” We don’t want to do that. Instead, “I’m so sorry you’re not feeling well…” And then go on with whatever else you were going to say, but you don’t admit fault.

5. ANGRY COMMENTS AND THEN SOME – Decide what you want to do with the commenter or the user, if anything. With different platforms, you can do different things. 

“There are things that are your care and there are things that are your concern, but they’re not the same things.” – Progress Coach Richard Ralston 

Facebook – You can actually hide a comment instead of deleting it. Here’s what happens when you hide a comment on Facebook: the author and their friends will be able to see the comment, but nobody else will be able to see them. I’ve always loved this because if you do get somebody who’s angry, whether it’s legitimate or not, if they’re angry enough and they have more time than you, they can take up a lot of your precious time by lashing out over and over again, or on other platforms.

*Not all platforms have the Facebook style of blocking. 

Twitter – Twitter has something that they call “soft blocking”. That’s where you can go in and you can basically make somebody unfollow you. They could still see you if they come to your Twitter profile but they won’t get notified and you will not have your tweets come up in their feed anymore. (Most platforms have full blocking.) 

Instagram – They might be the strictest, where you can literally block somebody almost entirely, including any future accounts that they may create. **Be aware though, people sometimes find ways around that.**

I also want to give a shout out to my friend, Natalie, who really put this in perspective for me because I have always been a people pleaser. A while ago I had a negative comment on my appearance on a YouTube video and I was constructing this long detailed response. Natalie said, “Is that really the best use of your time? Come on, that’s time, you could be spending with your kids.” REALITY CHECK!

Dealing with an over-complainer, bored-hater, retro-active stalker, self-feeding troll or grammar police is time that you could be better serving your paying customers or serving your loyal clients or dealing with legitimate, bad reviews or complaints.

As a business owner, you’re going to get complaints and that’s a good thing. That means that there is passion there. 

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