The dark side of Facebook Business is not very apparent at first
We post pictures and sales pitches about products and services. The public Likes it and Shares it. Your page is doing well and your website is getting more hits than ever. All is good in the ‘hood.
Not to pick on Facebook – all social media portals share in this dark side.
The unfair review
Your business receives a poor review on Facebook / TripAdvisor / TravelStart / Google / whatever.
Very often a business will receive a customer complaint and deal with it in-store. That same customer might still go online to complain about what happened and give a poor rating. Or go straight to the online portal to complain instead of approaching the business. Ratings and reviews are often abused by the public who fail to understand the purpose of it.
Reviews, ratings and recommendations all influence your Google ranking. Unfair reviews bring down your average rating. You cannot remove, hide or delete the review. Ever! You can try reporting the review, but I can assure you the answer will be “free speech rights”. The most you can do is respond to the reviewer, but it doesn’t help your rating one bit. The damage is done.
Trolls
When posting to social media the public has access to leave comments. Any comment. You will at some stage come across people who leave nasty comments on your posts and provoke others to engage in a verbal fight. The average person feels “invincible” and “invisible” online. They behave badly because they can. Dealing with these thugs is important to keep bad vibes away from your business marketing. Best advice is do not engage with them, just ban them and delete their comments. More admin for you…yay…
Squatters
Your post may be about your plumbing services. Before you know it, Joe Soap down the road posts a link to his plumbing business in the comments section with “better prices” than you offer. This underhanded tactic is especially irritating if you are paying to advertise your business/service. As a Facebook Business page owner you have the option to ban the pesky freeloader from your page. It asks that you pay attention to every notification from Facebook. The longer Joe Soap’s comment and link enjoys a free advertising ride on your post, the more customers you may be losing to him.
The Gangsters
Your business is in close competition with another similar business in your area. Your competitor only needs to get a handful of people to leave bad reviews on your social media pages to bring down your online rating and slip into your spot.
Because social media portals allow the public to willy-nilly create profiles and review companies, these forms of sabotage are so easy to pull off. Until clear rules and easy accessible settings are made available to business owners online, you will have to police it where you can.
Having said all this, there are valid reasons to use social media portals as discussed in our previous post.
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