Dealing with Haters on Facebook

Some good advice here. Many Hoosier businesses likely now have Facebook pages. While it’s a great way to reach out to customers and supporters, you’ll also get the occasional basher who uses your page to constantly "refudiate" (that’s Palinese) everything you try to do. The blog Journalistics takes a stab at how you can deal with it:

Few things are as gratifying as positive feedback from your Facebook Fans. Unedited commentary from your viewers can be both the greatest gift social media has to offer and your worst nightmare. While all the story ideas and friendly interactions make it worth all the effort, there are always those fans who find pleasure in being argumentative, disruptive, disagreeable and otherwise as negative as possible.

Some might argue that you need the negativity to balance things out in your social community. I think there’s an obvious difference between offering your honest opinion and being negative. Regardless of how you feel, if you manage your Facebook Page or another social community for your newsroom, you need to know how to deal with negative feedback from haters, potty mouths, know-it-alls and more. I’ve categorized the most-common negative personality types I’ve seen across a lot of different Facebook pages and have provided some suggestions for how to deal with each one.

The writer then dissects each category (below) further, so read the entire post:

  1. The Haters
  2. The Know-it-Alls
  3. The Pottymouths
  4. The Uninvited Guests
  5. The Spammers

Your Company Should Probably be Blogging

Unless you’re in the espionage business or something where you don’t want people to know what you’re up to, your company should probably be writing a blog. The blog Journalistics offers some advice on the why and how. Here’s a blip, but I’d recommend you read the whole thing:

There is only one thing that keeps most organizations from blogging…FEAR. The most common fears include:

  • Fear of People: your company is scared of people. If you write stuff on your blog, people will hold you to it (or hold the info against you). Worse, maybe competitors will get the upperhand – since information might leak out through the blog? And of course, people will say bad things about you in the comments. More good than bad will happen, trust me. Get over your fear and try a few posts – you won’t look back.
  • It’s Too Technical: HTML, CSS, RSS and PHP? Sounds like a bad game of Scrabble, right? A lot of organizations get hung up on the technical side of things. It’s too much work or will cost too much money to get a blog up and running. Honestly, it’s cheaper than almost any other type of marketing (and a lot easier to get a return). If you can type an email, you can probably figure out how to set up a basic blog. Custom programming and design costs more (but not as much as you think). And it will be well worth the investment.
  • Who’s Going to Write the Stuff? This is the biggest challenge in my opinion. It’s a lot of work to produce high-quality content on a regular basis. And if you succeed, you’ll also need to interact with your community (a topic for another post).

How to Make It Work

The last thing you want is to launch a blog and then have no content there. Your blog becomes a ghost town, and nobody comes to visit. You don’t have to crank out 100 posts a month to be successful. If you focus on quality over quantity, you can easily get away with four posts per month in the beginning (the minimum number I recommend).