Averting Disaster with Social Media
Social media can be an enormous asset to small businesses. It can help grow your consumer base and keep existing customers actively engaged with your product. What many don’t realize, however is that social media can also be used to avert disaster.
Social media is at heart a conversation about your products and services. But as with any conversation, comments on social media aren’t always positive and polite. What should you do if that conversation turns negative? What can you do to keep opinion from quickly turning against you? Do you fight the negativity head on, or do you simply ignore it? Here are some suggestions.
- Own up to your mistakes. Do not argue against negative remark. People will respect your company more if you admit when you are obviously in the wrong.
- Write personalized responses for individual consumer comments as soon as possible.
- Provide positive feedback to valid criticisms. Whether you offer words of reassurance or a special deal or gift, you tell the social media community that you care about them, and that you value every customer.
- Have a plan for handling negative feedback. You may want to analyze the base of the problem and then craft a response that says you understand the problem and are working on resolving it.
