Top 5 tips for beating Trolls on your Company Pages
The past few weeks has seen a rise in the publicity given to ‘trolls’ of social media sites, but how can you stop your company’s social networking pages becoming the victim of their attacks?
As ‘trolls’ are people who comment on social media sites do so purely to spark arguments and anger, they are often less focussed with the truth, and more with getting an anti-social reaction. With this in mind, here are our Top 5 tips for what to do if you find these little beasts plaguing your company site.
Tip #1 – Identifying the Troll
In many situations, users who you think are ‘trolls’ could just turn out to be disgruntled customers or jobseekers. Your first step should always be to identify who you are really dealing with. Have they used profane language or have they crossed the line? Just because someone may disagree with your hiring policy, does not make them a troll, in fact often they may have a valid point. Keep a cool head and try not to rush into anything.
Tip #2 – Fight fire with facts
Sometimes honesty is really the best policy and calmly explaining your company’s hiring conditions to a potential ‘troll’ can be a good way to cut off their argument before it begins. Anonymity can also play a big part in how nasty a situation can get, so by offering to come to a resolution with the user directly regarding their job application or customer service issue you can often take the wind out of their sails. Hopefully this will not only fix your bad feedback problem with your customer, but also show any other potential clients or employees that you don’t just ignore complaints.
Tip #3 – Avoiding Trolls
Prevention is always preferred over confrontation, so if you want to try to avoid the trolls altogether make sure you watch what you write on your company’s social media pages. Trolls are drawn to anything controversial or inflammatory and will do their best to make a bad situation worse. If you want to avoid having trolls picking apart your comments, don’t give them fuel for their fire. You may think that posting on the upcoming election could be good for your web presence, but make sure you think about the cost to your company brand if trolls get a hold of it first.
Tip #4 – Publish a Comments policy
Having a comments policy, whether it is for a company blog or Facebook page can really be key when combating some of the more nasty trolls. The one thing you don’t want to come across as is impulsive and having a well thought out policy about whether the ‘reply’ or ‘delete’ key will be pressed in any given situation will give your company much more credibility in dealing with bad situations. Make sure you publish this on your site though, so your users know what is expected of them too!
Tip #5 – Use the Block key!
So if you’ve tried reasoning with them, tried offering a solution and your dreaded troll just keeps up their negative comments, the block key is definitely the answer. Although blocking someone should be a last resort (you don’t want to come off as a social media dictator after all), it can sometimes be the best option, and especially if you’ve identified that you’re dealing with a full blown troll. Real trolls are there to cause mayhem and spread anti-social media, and whether you feed them the facts or not, will continue to be a thorn in your page’s side. In this case, cut your losses, lose a ‘like’ on your page and block the user from commenting – it will save you trouble in the long run.
