One click and it’s out there for all to see. It doesn’t take much nowadays for one comment on social media to impact a brand’s reputation thanks to the power of retweeting.
Obviously it’s good times when a well-known name is using your brand / service and tweeting about it positively. But, when they’re not, there could be trouble ahead. No doubt you are perfectly aware that if a social media user posts something negative about your brand, it needs a response asap. However, what do you do when this particular social media user has hundreds of thousands of followers who may have already seen their comment and possibly retweeted it to THEIR followers too?!
This was the case recently when Tom from The Wanted tweeted the following message to the Royal Bank of Scotland’s help team:
As you can see from the image above, his comment was retweeted 761 times and favourited 541 times. That’s a lot of people who have potentially now seen his message!
If you’ve ever had something similar happen or want to be prepared just in case it ever does, here are a few tips on what to do:
Acknowledge all comments if possible. This will prove to your customers that they are at the forefront of your customer service strategy. It shows you are listening. It will also show followers of the person who posted the negative comment that it is being dealt with and should hopefully slow down the number of retweets which could potentially start spreading a bad name for your brand. RBS’ social media customer care team did just that.
Avoid reacting rudely if someone says something negative about your brand. Take all comments on board and learn from them. Some negatives can always be turned into a positive. Yes, you may be able to see that a customer’s comment has been retweeted hundreds of times, however you reacting badly to this will just escalate the situation further.
Be efficient responding or at least set an expectation from the word go. Many customers will use social media to avoid the long telephone queues regularly associated with traditional customer service.
Our MD recently took part in an excellent webinar on monitoring for social customer service hosted by Our Social Times. If you would to find out more about how our social media monitoring and analysis services could help your digital customer strategy– give us a shout and we’ll get the virtual kettle on.