Negative Comments on Your Social Media Accounts
Protect your social media accounts with everything you have - and DO NOT engage with a troll!!
What do you do when your business social media accounts are targeted with negative comments? Hi, my name is Dr. Jennifer Gardella, owner and founder of the Gardella Group. We do strategic digital marketing for small business owners, and I've noticed a new phenomenon: business accounts are being targeted with negative comments that are not even related to that business.
Here's what's happening. An individual on either side of any issue will search Facebook for an open personal profile with keywords. They are searching for disparaging comments that they disagree with. For example, a person who is very Republican may do this, searching for very liberal individuals, and vice versa. They find an open profile where an individual is posting comments freely viewable by the public.
They then take those posts they disagree with and mock up an image to post on social media. In that image, they claim how evil, un-American, or extreme the individual is. Then they research where that person works, go onto the social media sites of that company, and start posting that image they created along with other disparaging comments. They post these comments directly to the business's Facebook page or LinkedIn profile and try to post them under all the comments on any post that the organization has created. This can amount to an enormous number of posts flooding into a business Facebook page.
As if that isn't horrible enough to try to deal with, sometimes they actually get it wrong. This just happened to two of my clients, where these individuals went after my clients' Facebook pages claiming that my client was hiring an individual with these extreme views. The problem was that the individual did not even work for my client. They wrote things like, "How dare you employ this person? Do you know what your employees stand for?" and targeted that company. We had to spend an inordinate amount of time not taking down the comments but responding to them and then watching the accounts like hawks to see if anything else popped up.
What we wound up doing in both situations was posting a comment that basically said the individual was not employed by the business. Of course, the individuals who had posted the comments didn't even reply or apologize; they just moved on to their next target. But it got me thinking: how many times is this going to happen? How often are we going to have employees who have open Facebook pages where they share their views on what is going on in the world, and then their companies are targeted by individuals who disagree with those views?
So, what should you do as a small business owner? Well, as always, I say that you should be checking your accounts every day. In your social media hour, which I teach you how to do quickly and efficiently every single day, make sure you are constantly checking for any comments on your page. I would also limit the ability of anyone to post original content to your business pages. Don't let them post, but I would not recommend taking away the ability for people to comment. You want to be generating comments on social media, so I would not turn off comments or lock down your pages. Instead, be vigilant in creating a routine that includes checking regularly. If this happens, methodically and neutrally comment that this individual is not part of your business. If they are part of your business, then say something to the effect of, "We do not engage with these comments."
I would not recommend blocking the posters, starting to fight with them on social media, or deleting what they are saying. That's what they want you to do. They want to start a war and say that you're deleting or not engaging in important conversations about who they hire. Don't give them what they want. A simple "This person is not involved with our organization" or "We do not engage with comments like this" is all you need to do.
I know it's hard and many of you are worried about this happening. This is a great time to put procedures in place for your business to be checking for comments regularly, checking your private messages regularly, and monitoring what is posted to your pages if you choose to leave that open. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to book a call with me, and I will walk you through this process. Thank you so much for your time, and again, if you have any questions, I am available.
