The Consequences of Doing Nothing – Negative Tweets

Social media is a fantastic solution for you to connect with your customers in a positive manner that increases your brand loyalty. Customers send a tweet about an experience they had with your business saying how awesome it was and how awesome you are but what if they send out a few negative tweets? How would you respond? How should you respond?

For those who do not think answering or dealing with the confrontation is worth it, here are just a few of the consequences you will need to worry about.

Seeming lack of competency and legitimacy in the digital space.

If you do not respond to the haters, you show a lack of competency to handle complex situations. If you cannot handle negative tweets, how can you handle your customer’s other requests? Trust is lost in this experience, and you are wasting the chance to fix what happened and regain the lost customer or potentially other clients that have viewed this experience on their Twitter feed.

Vulnerability to negative tweets affecting business is drastically increased.

Have you ever heard of the expression “Well everyone is doing it.” If you let the negative tweets go unresponded, it opens the floodgates for others to join in. This will start trending, then before you know it, everyone is posting their 2 cents whether it is true or not.

You have usually lost a customer.

The person that tweeted out their experience feels like they were wronged and they just want something to be done about it. If you were to do nothing about their reach for help, that customer is now no longer your customer. They will also be an advocate for your business, telling everyone why they should not do business with you. Which brings me to my next point!

You have lost potential customers.

Nowadays, most people research businesses online before they do business with them. Imagine this scenario, a visitor looks up information on your business and sees nothing but negative tweets and reviews that you have not at least made an effort to make right. How do you think that visitor will feel about you? What if you were that visitor and you were doing some shopping online, would you feel safe with your money shopping there?

So what do you do?

You respond. You respond to whatever their grievance is and work to make it right. If it was a bad customer experience shopping at your location, offer a gift card or something that will win back their affection for example. At least show them you care enough to respond to them to try your best to do the right thing.

You will also want it to be timely. Don’t wait to respond, as soon as you see it, reply to them and work to a solution.

Now I know there are situations where someone is just a troll. There are certain things you can do to work through those situations that I will go over in a later post.