Most social media users have, at some point in their time online, seen a business make mistakes on social media. This often leads to negative attention on the business and sometimes even the destruction of the business. How can we avoid some of these common pitfalls?

In the video, Social media for business: What you need to know, Peter Vogel discusses some of the dangers that social media poses to businesses. He leads the video with a discussion of the overall growth and power that social media holds, then warns of the dangers of social media with businesses. He discusses the issues that can arise with intellectual property and copyright and/or trademarks, the different types of social contracts, that the terms of service need to be customized for each company, and more. He concludes by offering advice such as being up front with how information is managed, managing the expectations of privacy, and knowing the legal risks of content management.

His advice is valuable, but how do we actionably manage the risks he discusses?

In this article from MIS Quarterly, Engaging Users on Social Media Business Pages: The Roles of User Comments and Firm Responses, they discuss a study on how users and businesses engage online and what actionable options we can utilize to help safeguard our business. The study was mainly focused on how and when a business should respond to user comments, and how uniqueness of response, timeliness of response, the sentiment of the comments, and the controversial tone of the comments affects the business’ social media engagement. The study found that businesses were more likely to respond to negative comments versus controversial comments and while prompt responses to either type of these comments drives an increase in engagement, it is often with a negative sentiment. That said, if the business provides unique responses, the engagement and sentiment of subsequent comments improves.

What that means for us is that we should respond to user comments in a unique way each time. While negative comments may frustrate us, we need to pause and respond to these comments without anger. Responding to a negative comment with a unique and unbiased response may, initially, garner some negative attention, but over time the sentiment of users should improve.