Social media: it can be one of the best marketing tools ever invented or it can be the bane of business communications. If you get the right person to engage with your company on social media, there could be no better marketing tool. If you have someone leave a nasty comment for the world to see, you can experience misery! It drives a lot of companies to shy away from truly jumping into social media with both feet.

Let’s focus on what to do if someone leaves a poor review, an accusation, or just a nasty comment on your company’s social media site. What should you do? Should you ignore it? Should you reply to it? Should you pull the plug on all social media and forego any benefits you might have experienced for the sake of guarding the reputation of the corporate brand? Here are a few suggestions.

Do you know the person who left the message?

Let’s start with the basics. Do you know who left the message? If this is your customer, you should respond to them. However, be careful that what you say doesn’t blow up into a public finger-pointing session. A better response would be to tell them you are sorry they experienced some sort of disappointment with the company and you will be contacting them in person. Apologize, but don’t drag any more details into the post if you can help it. What if you are not sure if this is a customer? Use your discretion, but you might again respond with an apology and ask them to contact your customer service by phone to help resolve the situation. Social media banter is prone to become explosive in a short amount of time. Try to diffuse the situation by offering another form of communication. In some cases, people leave messages without their real name. If this is someone hiding behind a pseudonym or a meme, you may want to report them as a spammer. That is, if what they say is inflammatory and it isn’t true. Which leads me to my next point.

Is the nasty comment true?

If it is true, then you have a problem you need to resolve. You may want to respond to the person and thank them for pointing out the problem and let them know your company is working to put an end to the issue. Of course, you should only say that if you truly are going to solve the problem. If you don’t, you can expect more and more complaints posted to your site. This is the power of the transparency that is social media. You cannot hide your problems once they are called out. However, corporations have used the changes they have made to correct deficiencies called out on social media to better market their brands. A change that started with a concerned consumer is very marketable, especially back to the person who first complained.

If the comment is not true, what can you do? Sometimes people leave nasty comments with no foundation for a complaint. A former employee may have an ax to grind. An impossible-to-please customer may light you up. That is the world we live in. If the situation cannot be resolved, what should you do? One method is to encourage more comments to be made on your social media site to bury the negative comment. For instance, many social media sites show the most recent comments at the top of a list. Ask satisfied customers to ‘like” you on social media or to post a comment. This is actually a great way to retain customers and to thwart any bad experiences they had from being posted on social media. If you ask them to tell you about their experience shortly after the sale, you will find that it invites any disappointment with your brand or the way you do business to be revealed in a situation where you can respond personally. Everyone is going to have a disappointed client from time to time. Managing that client is key to your future business.

Stay away from the inflammatory conversations

One more thing to consider: social media can be a very explosive format. It is better to stay away from the tit-for-tat exchanges, even if the person is wrong. It looks childish to duke it out verbally on social media. It is your job to guard your company’s brand. You can state the truth and then let it go, regardless of additional comments from the deranged world of social media trolls.