You’ve worked hard to get the Facebook page for your business looking awesome, your website streamlined, and your Twitter follower count into the stratosphere. Will you let it all fall apart because of lack of maintenance?
Imagine building a home. With the right crew and good weather, you might be able to get it built and finished within three or four months. How long would it take to tear down with a few hand grenades and a flamethrower? A few hours at most. Destroying things is always quicker and easier than creating them, and a few hand-grenade-spam posts or a vindictive online flamethrower can burn your social reputation to the ground before you know what’s going on. If you let them.
Don’t Stop Me, Even if You’ve Heard This One Before
Just like thunder in the never-ending weather patterns, I’m back to remind you once again that maintaining your social media accounts on a daily basis is an absolute requirement, not a suggestion, to become and remain successful in the space. Sorry to beat a dead horse, but truth is truth.
I don’t know about you, but I almost always read the comments at the end of any article to see what the general public has to say about the matter. I often find additional insight from commenters that will make the information that much more clear or interesting. It’s extremely annoying when you are reading comments and come to what is obviously a spammy ad for something else. They’ll mention something about the article and then try to get you to follow their link for “better” information, or sometimes they don’t even put in that much time.
Incendiary Posts are Often Spam
A post or comment doesn’t have to be an ad or a spammy link to be considered spam. There are plenty of trolls out there who get their jollies by trying to defame or denigrate people and businesses by randomly posting negative comments on their blogs, posts, or feeds. Sometimes they are even paid by your competitors to do so.
These spammy and/or negative comments are grenades thrown into your building, but they don’t have to do any damage. Grenades always have a time frame that they can be removed before they go off and blow things up, even if it’s a short one. The attacking posts on your pages can also be removed before they do much damage, but the longer they remain the more they do.
The Fine Line
The line you don’t want to cross is removing legitimate complaints or issues from real customers. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, but usually a social media manager with experience can spot the spammers and trolls a mile away. Of course, that doesn’t matter if don’t use one, which is one good reason you should.
Removing legitimate complaints can have worse implications than leaving spam in your posts. If your real customers start to think that you don’t care about your customers problems, they’ll drop you like a hot potato. Always try to diffuse situations with legitimate complaints, and only remove the comments if they become worse or cannot be satisfied through reaching out.
Spam, on the other hand, should be removed within seconds if possible, hours at the most. Moderating comments is one way to avoid this issue, but unless you post the legitimate complaints as well you’re back to the previous problem of losing trust. This isn’t a hard lesson to learn, but it can be a costly one if not learned quickly. For the least hassles and the best results, it’s always recommended to let a professional handle your accounts under your oversight.
