This blog will discuss how to deal with negative comments/trolling on social media and in particular YouTube.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and has one billion unique monthly visitors  meaning one out of every two internet users is on YouTube. As evident from this infographic, which has all of it’s sources referenced thus all the information can be checked.

Source: (cdn.uploadvr.com, 2016)

Kincy (2011) identifies responding to negative feedback online as an important step in planning a social media campaign. It should be noted that Companies that combine marketing messages and “fun” postings attract significantly fewer negative comments (Dekay, 2012).
It has to be considered that the study by Dekay (2012), was conducted regarding negative comments on Facebook.
Facebook and YouTube are quite different but the essence of negative feedback remains the same from one social media to another.
Social media has helped develop businesses in many ways but it also opened up the possibility of negative feedback, and for it to be seen by any potential customers a brand might have. This might deter potential customers.
Negative feedback is now a regular aspect of a brands social media communications (Sharma, 2016). Dealing effectively with negative comments/trolls/feedback is very important in the age of the internet. Firstly every business with a social presence must have a strategy in place for dealing with negative comments.
Owning up to your mistakes if there are any is a good place to start off along with,

• Recognizing the complaint
• Apologizing for the inconvenience caused to the customer and
• Showing intent to resolve the issue

Criticism should be faced head on rather then passed on (Sharma, 2016).
Young entrepreneurs council (2015) also identifies that 90 percent of users who reached out to them with a problem just wanted to be heard.
It would be foolish to assume that negative comments and feedback is a one-off event, so planning accordingly is important. This means that a system should be in place which constantly monitors for brand mentions (Sharma, 2016).
Communication with a customer plays a big role in mitigating backlash from negative comments and this should be taken into consideration by all companies with a social media presence.
There is a difference between negative but constructive comments and trolling and the first should never be mistaken for the second.
Negative but constructive comments should not be viewed as bad or negative as Chris Kneeland the CEO of Cult Collective said “ I learn more from negative feedback than positive. It’s easy to give a compliment. It usually requires both courage and clarification to be critical, especially when it’s not anonymous” (Mcguire, 2016)
Same cannot be said of trolls, who leave comments that are designed to hurt you or your brand and often use over-the-top offensive language (Brown, 2018).
Brown (2018) also identifies that engaging trolls is not productive and that “if you respond, they win” also mentioning that “ your outraged responses are what trolls want”.
There seems to be no way to win with trolls, but Bob Gower the organization design consultant for The Ready put it pretty bluntly. Some feedback or in this case a comment by a troll is simply not useful and need not be taken seriously “Treat feedback as a gift, take it in, and be willing to let go when it doesn’t work” (Mcguire, 2016).
In my opinion another very interesting way to approach negative feedback on social media and in this particular case YouTube is to look at what Wendy’s does.
Wendy’s is a American fast food restaurant with a simple social media campaign, super responsiveness (Tice, 2013).
According to Tice (2013), “Every comment, even complaints about customer service at restaurants, is pleasantly and promptly answered”.
But if we dig deeper we stumble upon a very important fact. Wendy’s answers some comments in a rather informal way.
As Gallucci (2017), put it Wendy’s doesn’t play by unspoken social media rules that other companies adhere to.
Resulting in creative and engaging social media posts from Wendy’s, like the one Katy Wellhousen posted on her twitter page.
As Tice (2013), mentioned in her blog “Making a social media marketing campaign patently ludicrous seems to help shield it from being a target of rude comments on Twitter”.
In my opinion this is a very effective way to respond to negative feedback and feedback in general.
As mentioned Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are certainly different kinds of social media platforms and this should be taken into account. But ways of responding to negative feedback/trolling on these platforms don’t vary significantly.
To sum it up negative comments and trolling are a part of social media that no brand, big or small can escape. Thus they might as well start looking for ways on how to minimize their effects and at the bare minimum respond to them in an effective fashion.
Or as the case with Wendy’s turn negative feedback and comments into a very effective social media campaign.

This Blog on “dealing with negative comments and trolls on YouTube” was done as a part of an marketing assignment by a student.

 References:

[1] Brown, L., 2018. filmora.wondershare. [Online]
Available at: https://filmora.wondershare.com/youtube-video-editing/how-to-deal-with-haters-negative-comments.html
[Accessed 24 February 2019].

[2] Dekay, S.H., 2012. How large companies react to negative Facebook comments. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 17(3), pp.289-299.

[3] Gallucci, N., 2017. mashable.com. [Online]
Available at: https://mashable.com/2017/01/05/sassy-wendys-social-media-manager/?europe=true
[Accessed 27 March 2019].

[4] Kincy, J. 2011, “Dealing with negative feedback”, ABA Bank Marketing, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 38.

[5] Mcguire, S., 2016. venngage. [Online]
Available at: https://venngage.com/blog/negative-feedback/
[Accessed 24 February 2019].

[6] Sharma, A., 2016. blogbrandz. [Online]
Available at: https://www.blogbrandz.com/tips/deal-negative-feedback-social-media/
[Accessed 24 February 2019].

[7] Tice, C., 2013. forbes.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/caroltice/2013/10/28/wendys-social-media-success-secretmassive-stupidity/#74fa82be265e
[Accessed 27 March 2019].

[8] Young entrepreneurs council , 2015. Inc. [Online]
Available at: https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/9-effective-ways-to-handle-negativity-on-social-media.html
[Accessed 24 February 2019].

[9] cdn.uploadvr.com, 2016 [online]
Available at: https://cdn.uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/youtube-logo.png
[Accessed 28 March 2019].

In this blog post we will discuss how to effectively reach a desired target demographic using LinkedIn and all the tools that LinkedIn provides for doing so.
In this case our aim is to reach a demographic of educated professionals working for small to medium size and large enterprises.
LinkedIn is the world biggest professional network with more than 610 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide (Linkedin.com, 2019).
Bonsón & Bednárová (2013) describe it as a platform through which members and companies are able to create and share their professional identities online, and build and engage with their professional networks.

(blog.durump.io, 2017)

A LinkedIn page helps customers learn about your services and products. LinkedIn helps you with setting up a company page, if you have any questions you can always visit the LinkedIn assistance page  or simply ask google. Setting up a page is relatively easy the hard part is to actually engage with customers and reach the desired target demographic this can be done in a couple of ways.

Simplest way to reach a demographic is to advertise and LinkedIn has good tools for advertising on it’s platform, such as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. It works like any other social media marketing tool you can choose the age, location, job function, gender and industry and target your ads according to these characteristics.

More importantly LinkedIn has a tool that can track what is being Said about your company  (Gregory, 2010), which also gives firms a tool to measure the impact and the perception of their enterprise.

BusinessNewsDaily.com (2014) staff recommend to grow your marketing list by asking them to be a part of the mailing list, they highly recommend it.
It is also worth mentioning that mailing lists are not as effective of a marketing tool as they are perceived to be for a number of reasons, firstly People that receive emails get so many of them that they lose relevance. Engagement cannot be tracked through emails, content cannot be personalized  and younger audience is less likely to respond to email marketing (TripBuilderMedia, 2019).

Each one of your employees can be a brand ambassador through LinkedIn since they can also post documents and multimedia to their profiles (Hutchins, 2016).
This is an opportunity not to well understood and underutilized by companies on LinkedIn and other social media platform alike. Making sure that your most popular keywords are in your company profile and presenting a more consistent image to customers makes your company look more professional.

Sites like Wordtracker or GoodKeywords can be used to find the best and hottest keywords in your field (Elad, 2018).
As mentioned in the beginning LinkedIn is an enormous platform that helps individuals and companies reach millions of potential customers and employees as evident from this infographic. LinkedIn also has 42 million unique monthly mobile visitors and their conversion rate is 3 times better when we compared it to Facebook or twitter (SocialMediaMarketo, 2016).

LinkedIn should not be overlooked as a potential tool for reaching desired demographics along with being one of the best mediums through which communication with the corporate world is possible.

If utilized properly by a professional as mentioned above LinkedIn is a powerful medium of communication but one should never forget that having a ‘Dead’ profile page doesn’t speak highly of the company, Thus it should be avoided at all costs.
Good news is it is very easy to keep your company or personal profile updated.

As Horn, (2016) mentioned in his blog post about reinvigorating LinkedIn profiles “On LinkedIn, less is often more, and quality almost always trumps quantity” a quote which In my opinion perfectly describes the essence of LinkedIn.

This Blog on “How to Reach Desired Target Demographics using Linkedin” was done as a part of an marketing assignment by a student.

References:

BusinessNewsDaily, 2014. BusinessNewsDaily.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7206-linkedin-marketing-business.html
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Bonsón, E. & Bednárová, M. 2013, “Corporate LinkedIn practices of Eurozone companies”, Online Information Review, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 969-984.

blog.drumup.io, 2017 [online]
Available at: https://blog.drumup.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/linkedin-400850_1280.png
[Accessed 2 March 2019]

Elad, J., 2018. dummies.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.dummies.com/social-media/linkedin/how-to-market-your-business-through-linkedin/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Gregory, A., 2010. sitepoint.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.sitepoint.com/use-linkedin-promote-business/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Horn, B. A., 2016. authorityalchemy. [Online]
Available at: https://authorityalchemy.com/reinvigorate-linkedin/
[Accessed 2 March 2019].

Hutchins, A.L. 2016, “Beyond resumes: LinkedIn for marketing educators”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 137-147.

Linkedin.com, 2019. Linkedin. [Online]
Available at: https://about.linkedin.com/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

SocialMediaMarketo, 2016. socialmediamarketo.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.socialmediamarketo.com/business-benefits-linkedin-company-page-infographic/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

TripBuilderMedia, 2019. TripBuilderMedia.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.tripbuildermedia.com/2019/02/6-reasons-email-marketing-doesnt-work-well-for-your-association/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

hello comrades

Welcome to your brand new blog at University of Brighton Blog Network.

To get started, simply log in, edit or delete this post and check out all the other options available to you.

For assistance, visit our comprehensive support site and check out our Edublogs User Guide guide.

You can also subscribe to our brilliant free publication, The Edublogger, which is jammed with helpful tips, ideas and more.