How to Handle & Monitor Social Media for Negative Reviews and Comments?

8 min readMar 15, 2023

At the present time, numerous business owners and social media marketers monitor social media for negative reviews. However, not all of them know how to deal with negative comments on social media efficiently.

This article talks about the importance of negative feedback for your brand reputation. Additionally, it serves as a guide for handling negative reviews. It also includes tips on how to monitor your social media accounts and how to respond to negative comments.

So, let’s start!

How do Negative Comments on Social Media Affect your Brand?

It’s no surprise that negative social media comments have a much stronger impact and spread faster than positive reviews. At some point, all of us have visited Google Reviews –or other online reviews platforms– to see how other customers feel about a product or service we are interested in.

But, how do negative comments on social media really affect your business?

Surprisingly, statistics argue that it takes about 40 positive customer experiences to fix the damage caused by 1 negative review.

Negative comments on social media can severely damage companies’ brand reputations, making people lose their trust in them.

So, for starters, let’s see the best ways to react when a negative mention or comment knocks on your door!

How to Handle Negative Comments on Social Media?

Why do people make negative comments on social media?

The answer could vary from person to person. While this may be true, the most plausible explanation comes in the form of a customer complaint. Basically, people might have paid for your product or service and didn’t feel satisfied with what they got.

So how do you resolve the issue?

Here are 8 valuable tips to help you be prepared when a negative comment crisis strikes. Additionally, we’re including successful examples of responses to negative comments on social media.

1. Don’t Delete or Ignore the Negative Comments

Sometimes, disappointed customers can get angry and rude. That doesn’t mean their experience wasn’t valid. When your client’s negative experience is already out there, the worst thing to do is to delete the comment or ignore it. In any case, you should answer every mention, whether they talk about your brand positively or negatively.

This will help you boost your engagement rate and credibility score, all while catching risky mentions before they go viral.

Source: H&M Instagram

2. Respond Fast

Above all, negative reviews demand a quick response. Other customers are also evaluating your communication. As research shows, 39% of social media users anticipate brands to respond to their mentions, questions, and messages within 60 minutes.

However, the average response time for businesses is surprisingly 5 hours –more or less.

3. Be Polite and Patient

Be polite, considerate, patient, and constructive. You don’t want your customer support staff to respond in a rude way –whether it’s publicly or not. Responding to one negative review shows people that you’re paying attention to their opinion, problems, and needs. By all means, this is crucial in creating a positive user experience.

Source: Instagram

4. Thank Them for the Feedback

Sometimes examples of negative comments on social media can be about a person’s attempt of lowering a brand’s credibility. However, most of the time, it’s about a customer wanting to be heard and help a company become better. Therefore, always show gratitude for receiving customer feedback. Above all, you should always make your audience feel like their problems are being acknowledged. Let them know publicly that their feedback is valuable to you.

Source: Twitter

5. Explain the Cause of the Problem Clearly

If a misfortunate mistake or failure happened, always accept the responsibility. It is the first step in turning a negative reviewer into a brand advocate.

Instead of making excuses, offer a sincere apology, an honest explanation of what went wrong, and a clear solution to the problem. For one thing, this will help shift your customer’s trust back.

Source: Instagram

6. Take the Follow-Up Conversation Privately

After apologizing publicly, try to continue the conversation in private to get or provide more in-depth information about the incident. In fact, you can contact the user yourself in a private chat on social media.

Alternatively, provide your business number/contact info and ask them to reach you on their own terms.

Source: Twitter

7. Personalize your Reply

Regardless of the content of your social media comments, mentions, and reviews, you should create personal responses that feel genuine. Try talking on a first-name basis with the customer and avoid copying and pasting the same apology every time.

Surprisingly, it’s small details like these that make your audience feel like they’re talking to actual people –not robots.

8. Know When You Shouldn’t Respond to Negative Comments

One of the main rules of successful online reputation management is to never engage with detractors. Their motivation is not to solve the situation, but to draw the attention of other customers.

By involving in communication under their posts, the issue you want to settle only becomes worse. Moreover, detractors tend to twist your responses and put them in a negative context. Therefore, respond shortly and politely, but only if it seems necessary.

How to Monitor Social Media for Negative Reviews?

Ok, so now we know how to react when disaster strikes. However, there is one key factor that can change the game to our benefit. Or at least, make it count in our favor. Speed!

In order to protect your brand’s reputation, you should see crucial social mentions quickly. After negative posts on social media, it’s important to have time to prepare your response and take further action. If you want to be able to do that, media monitoring is your friend. In short, you need to monitor social media for negative reviews.

There are plenty of perks for marketers that are using an intelligent tool to monitor social media for negative reviews.

So how can you monitor social media for negative reviews?

Let’s take it step by step!

Step 1: Pick a Social Monitoring Tool

There are many social media monitoring tools you can contact and find out if they’re suitable for your business.

In general, review management tools help users to stay up to date with their online reputation effortlessly. For example, Mentionlytics offers valuable features, like review monitoring, social sentiment analysis, and social intelligent advice. These processes are important for your social media presence and customer service improvement –and you can’t do them by yourself.

So, look for a monitoring tool that suits your needs, and budget. For instance, let’s say you start using Mentionlytics. What would you do next?

Step 2: Adding the Keyword/Tracker

To get started, you need to log into the Mentionlytics app profile and click on the “Add Keyword/Tracker” tab.

Step 3. Setting the Mention Tracker category

The app’s mention tracker wizard offers 3 different groups to monitor keywords about your:

Brand (this is about your own brand name, product or service name, owned social media accounts, etc.)
Competitors (you can use the brand names of your competitors, and their products/services)
Industry (marketing leads, commonly used phrases or keywords, etc.)

Plus, you have the option to add keywords to an existing mention tracker. If you want to monitor the negative feedback from your social media accounts, you’ll choose the “Brand Monitoring” category.

Step 4. Naming the Mention Tracker

A mention tracker name is basically a group of keywords and social media profiles that you want to monitor. These generic terms will be used when discussing the brand.

Step 5. Adding the main keyword

After naming the mention tracker, the next step is defining keywords and/or phrases that you want to start monitoring.

Here, you can choose more specific words/names, such as the name of a product or service. Additionally, you can add the names of people related to your business in one way or another. For example, you can track the name of the company’s CEO or a social media campaign’s lead influencer.

Step 6: Defining the Language, Source, or Regions to monitor

By using SIA –Mentionlytics’ Social Intelligence Advisor– users can customize the places the app’s trackers will monitor. These places can be customized by geographical location, language, or based on a particular source.

Also, by setting the data sources, you can choose to monitor websites, specific social media profiles, or any other web source.

Step 7. Adding the Social Profiles to Monitor

This step is crucial for tracking the negative comments on social media sites and the damage to reputation caused by them.

Start by adding the media type, and the URL or the name of the social media profile. Then, SIA will recognize the specific profiles you want to start monitoring. After that, all actions of your brand’s social media accounts will be collected as mentions no matter what keywords appear there.

Step 8. Creating an Email Alert

Without a doubt, this is the most critical step to creating an effective crisis management system for your brand. In short, adding your email address enables SIA to send you notifications whenever someone mentions the company or brand. This is particularly valuable when we’re talking about negative alerts.

Furthermore, you can also designate the emailing frequency and the date you want to receive the first email.

Step 9. Completing the Setup

By clicking on the “Confirm” button, the Mention Tracker starts collecting every type of content: posts, keywords, mentions, and comments.

You are all set up! Now, it’s time for SIA to start tracking, collecting, and analyzing data. Afterward, it’s your time to get insights, tips, and personalized advice in return.

Just like that!

Now Over to You

So, this is everything you need to know on how to monitor social media for negative reviews and handle negative comments.

While it’s important to really understand the effects of negative comments on social media, you shouldn’t become scared of them. After all, they strive to boost the customer experience for your business and help your products be improved.

Luckily, there are social media monitoring tools, like Mentionlytics, that can notify you of anything worthy of checking out.

Have more questions? Book a live demo with Mentionlytics and let our experts explain how our social media monitoring software can help you.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/monitor-social-media-for-negative-reviews