Instagram is a powerful platform where brands and creators publish content and users share their opinions. Positive comments and support enhance a brand’s reputation, while negative comments and trolls diminish it. Instagram gives complete freedom to the audience to share their thoughts and perspectives on brands and creators content. It could be negative feedback from an unhappy customer or a deliberately provocative comment from trolls and haters. Such negative comments and trolls can tarnish your brand reputation and prevent new customers from trusting it.
If you think people will not notice one negative comment in the ocean of positive ones, you are highly misjudging its impact. One negative comment can overshadow all the positive comments and can change the whole perspective. Therefore, whether you are an established brand or a small business, managing these trolls and negative comments in a professional manner is important. In this blog, we are going to share how to handle such negativity on Instagram and maintain a positive brand image.
Monitor your Comments
The first and most important step in handling negative comments and trolls is to monitor them regularly. Keep a look at your comment section or use third-party apps to monitor and manage your comments. This helps you handle such negative comments and feedback before they get too hyped to damage your brand reputation. It also helps you respond quickly, calm unsatisfied customers, and remove spam and offensive comments. Furthermore, using services like Blastup to buy likes can help you retain a positive image by balancing negative comments with positive engagement.
Decide Whether to Respond or Ignore
Negative comments can be customer complaints, trolls, threatening comments, and provoking comments. You have two main options to deal with such comments – either respond to them constructively or ignore them. Ignoring the trolls is the best way to deal with such comments, as the main intention of trollers is just to gain some attention. By ignoring them, you can easily fail their motive and keep them out of your profile. Do not indulge in any arguments or controversies with them, as it can fuel their trolling.
However, it’s important to respond calmly when it comes to genuine negative feedback from your customers. This could be a complaint about a product’s functionality or a service that didn’t meet expectations. Understand their concerns and problems, accept your mistakes, if any, and try to solve their issues.
Always Respond on Time
Negative comments gain hype in a few hours, overshadowing thousands of positive comments on your posts. They reach a larger audience and quickly harm your brand’s image and reputation; therefore, timely response is critical. Failure to respond demonstrates a lack of interest in your customers’ problems, fueling criticism.
Responding quickly reflects that you are genuinely concerned about your customers and put a full stop to further negativity. This also reduces the amount of time it takes for others to notice the comment and your lack of response. Therefore, as soon as you see a negative comment, either reply to it decently or delete it if that is spam.
Respond Politely and Professionally
Negative remarks are normally directed against your product, services, or content, rather than you, unless they are intended to be controversial. Therefore, don’t take them personally and avoid reacting impulsively or harshly. Respond to comments respectfully and professionally, demonstrating your maturity. Address legitimate concerns and feedback from your followers and customers and acknowledge them. If there is some issue with your product or service, accept it, apologize sincerely, and give your explanation. Avoid getting into arguments to prove your products or services are right when customers share a genuine concern or issue. Suggest a possible solution to them and get their trust back.
Appreciate their Feedback
Don’t always try to prove yourself correct and treat complaints and feedback as constructive criticism. People just want to tell you their problems, and social media is the easiest medium to do so. They just want to be heard and acknowledged; therefore, rather than ignoring or deleting their comments, respond calmly. Apologize if they had a negative experience, assure them that you will make improvements, and provide them with solutions.
If someone complains about your content, thank them for their feedback and tell them that their suggestions will be implemented. By doing this, you can turn your unsatisfied customers or disappointed followers into happy supporters.
Ask Them to Contact You Privately
Another simple way to handle negative comments and trolls on Instagram is to contact privately and keep others out of it. Sometimes, it’s not good for your brand when certain complaints and issues come out in the public eye. In such situations, you can ask the person to contact you privately, which is the best way if the problem cannot be solved through one comment.
Don’t send a private message directly, as it can frustrate the person even more. The best way is to reply to their comment, requesting them to message privately to sort out the problem. This shows your followers that you are trying to connect with the person and are willing to address the issue. Once the issue is resolved, you can even ask them to remove their comment so that new followers or customers don’t see it.
Delete or Hide Offensive Comments
If you think that the comment is not genuine but unnecessarily rude, hateful, offensive, or spam, consider removing it. Some people comment only to gain attention, and the best way to stop them is to delete their comments. Such comments increase negativity in your comment section, overshadow positive comments, and harm your brand image.
However, don’t delete genuine complaints, even if they contain hateful language. This can frustrate such genuine customers even more, which is harmful to your brand image. This indicates that you are attempting to hide something from your followers; therefore, try to resolve their issue rather than deleting their comment.
Block or Report Abusive Users
If you see an account consistently making nasty remarks about your brand or posting harassing comments, block and report them. Such users just aim to tarnish your image and support some other brand in your comment section to manipulate your followers. Blocking them prohibits them from viewing your profile and commenting on your posts. Furthermore, reporting them will alert Instagram’s algorithm to review their account and suspend them if they break community guidelines. Instagram will suspend their account for a few days, and if they repeat their behavior again, their account will be permanently suspended.
Conclusion
Negative comments and trolls are a part of social media, and no one can avoid them altogether. However, there are some easy ways to handle such negative criticism politely and professionally to protect your brand image. Stay calm and respond to constructive criticism and genuine complaints. Apologize for your mistakes and provide solutions to your customer’s problems in the comments or privately. To avoid trolls and spammers, delete their comments and block them to prevent them from commenting repeatedly. Handling negative comments correctly can even turn your trollers and dissatisfied customers into devoted supporters.