First off, bad comments do not necessarily mean a bad thing. The person could be upset for a variety of reasons and the best thing to do is find out why they are upset. Maybe it says it in the post. Maybe it doesn’t but their anger is in the post. But an unhappy person is not a big thing – it could lead to you doing something better.
So here’s how I would handle it.
- If what the person is complaining about is a misunderstanding, then I would address it right there with the correct information. Hopefully, that fixes the issue and everything goes back to normal. This also gives correct information to anyone else who was confused and just didn’t feel like commenting.
- If it is anger at a situation and they are striking out, then you might want to friend the person on Facebook with the understanding that you are Page Admin and you would like to talk. Or give up your personal information in the form of an email or phone number for them to reach out. The main thing here is to get the dialogue off the page.
- If the person just wants to rant on you, that’s fine for them to do it off the page and give them the encouragement to voice their opinions to you. If you listen, give some feedback, tell them that their issues are being heard internally and you are giving them a voice to leadership, they may be happy with that and stop spamming your page.
- If the problem doesn’t go away and they insist on using your wall for complaining, you can ask them to cease and desist. They may have a problem with this so make sure your guidelines are posted somewhere on the page. If they violate those, then you can ban the person. I want to make sure that everyone understands this is a last resort. I would do everything to try and get the person happy before resorting to this. Here’s what the ND Facebook Page Guidelines look like:
“The University of Notre Dame welcomes lively discussion on its Facebook page, but monitors posts to maintain community standards. Content that contains obscenity or profanity, personal attacks, commercial or sales/promotional material or anything otherwise determined to be inappropriate will be deleted by page administrators.”
Sometimes you will get a marketer or random violator that adds comments to posts that are unrelated. Normally, I would just let these go. Your normal readers understand that these are just silly and don’t have anything to do with the content so getting rid of them is more trouble than it is probably worth.
One thing I would like to share is that the new facebook page allows you to comment as yourself. If you get a lot of comments from marketers or random silliness, just post a couple of relevant comments on the post underneath them. This will force their comments off the front page and into the “more” comments section and out of sight unless the user opens the comments section.
What are your techniques for dealing with unhappy comments?
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