Harnessing the power of social media negativity

By Niamh Oakes, for Comms Creatives

“If you’ve spent any time on the internet, then you will know that negative comments are a standard part of our digital lives.

If you work in social media, you’ve almost certainly experienced it on a personal level.

Nothing is safe; not your most wholesome video, or a fun announcement, or a competition launch. Someone online will always find a way to complain.

But what if that negativity can serve a bigger, better purpose? What if you can utilise it to improve your strategy and connect with your audience?

It can be daunting, tackling this issue that is so familiar to us comms professionals.

As a comms officer at Manchester City Council, I often find myself bracing for an onslaught of anger and upset.

Whether it’s missed bin collections or road closures, social issues or event listings, we see just about every creative insult you can think of.

And it’s so easy to fall into that trap of “how can we avoid this?”, especially when you’re trying to be creative.

It’s an old psychological concept: choosing the path of least resistance, the safest route ahead.

And sure, unique ideas and new campaign approaches could have great impact, but if they open you up to even more negativity, is it really worth it?

My belief, and the reason I’m writing this, is that it is.

Not only being unafraid of that negativity, but actively embracing it, is so worthwhile; it offers unfiltered insights and opportunities for improvement, that we can adopt in our strategies and use for real, impactful change straight from the horse’s mouth.

The nature of negativity on social media

Understanding why social media seems to breed these negative spaces is the first step if you want to see its value.

I’ve always found it strange when commentators depict social media as a great cesspit, a place where the worst of the worst can thrive, turning even the kindest of people into unyielding trolls.

I don’t believe that’s true; human nature has always had its diabolical streaks.

I can’t accept that social media has brought out the worst in us all that otherwise wasn’t there.

What I can believe, though, is that social media allows us an unprecedented global forum to voice those worst parts of ourselves.

It almost acts as a petri dish, cultivating traits that were already there but now have an avenue; the ability to be anonymous, to find ourselves in an echo chamber of similar views, to relieve our stresses without consequence.

And that is why it’ll always be a space prone to negativity and criticism.

But that doesn’t mean you should be afraid of it.

As much as social media gives even the worst voices a platform, it also gives one to our kindest, most understanding, most vulnerable thoughts, too.

It is simply a place that insists on the rawest of human emotion, and to me, that’s why it is such an important part of any comms strategy to actively listen to what you’re being told, even if it’s not easy.

If you are using a platform to share your messages, you must be receptive to the ones that come back.

You’ll never get the honesty you do on social media anywhere else. Not in your focus groups, your networking, your surveys.

You’ll never quite understand what immediately touches a nerve, or what makes people itch, or how you’re affecting someone until they tweet at you in an aggravated flurry.

And only then can you extract those key, authentic emotions and turn them into tangible change that is directed by none other than your own audience.

It’s an endlessly powerful tool that so many of us try to run from without stopping to think about what we’re missing out on.

It needs to be said that I’m not talking about trolling or online abuse here.

Block, report, and delete those comments. It’s not even worth thinking about.

But when it comes to criticism, kneejerk reactions, arguments and sarcasm, there’s so much we can take from those emphatic responses that might otherwise feel overwhelming and scary.

It’s worth taking the time to listen.

I’ve defined three simple steps you can use to harness the power of online negativity: Embrace, Empower, Engage.

Easy, right?

Step 1: Embracing the negativity

It’s a cliche, but for good reason; if you want to overcome a problem, you first need to accept that it exists.

This couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to your social media strategy.

In a landscape in which your every action is digitally recorded for the rest of time, there’s nowhere you can truly hide from the reality of negative comments.

The key thing here is to keep those comments in mind while you write copy, plan a new campaign, update your strategy.

If we at MCC let every comment we get dictate what sort of content we put out, we wouldn’t have anything to post at all.

Now that’s not to say you shouldn’t listen to your audience when they say they don’t want to see something – we’ll get on to that later, but in summary, you absolutely should –  but don’t immediately discredit yourself and your ideas out of fear of how a select few will react.

In much the same way that there will always be rain in Manchester, or I will always cross the street immediately to pet a dog, there will always be people holding a grudge that take aim on social media, and more often than not, it’s us comms professionals who are the target.

Accept that. You can’t change it, you can only control how you deal with it, and that starts with embracing the chaos.

A perfect example of being suddenly faced with this sort of negativity would be our Christmas campaign.

As someone who loves everything festive, I was so excited to roll out all the content we’d been planning for months already.

From TikToks showing off our new Christmas Market mug designs to Facebook round ups of our citywide events, I really believed I’d written a campaign that our audience would love as much as I did. And why wouldn’t they?

Obviously, I was wrong.

Our first post of the campaign went live around late October, and was immediately swarmed with angry comments dripping with sarcasm, disappointment, or outright nastiness.

And I’ll admit it: it hurt.

Of course it did! As comms professionals, our work is fused with our creativity, and it hurts when that creativity isn’t received as you’d hoped it would be.

That’s okay.

The most important thing, though, is not to dwell on it.

This happens. It is an ever-present reality of our work in the digital space, and one we will never truly be able to run from.

It would’ve been so easy – and tempting, for that matter – to immediately reduce our Christmas output and try to minimise the negative amplification we were receiving. But the truth is that the same criticism would only come back as soon as another campaign, or just a single post, launches, and there is no value in retracting your efforts for fear of angering the social media beast.

Comments can be deleted. Your posts can be deleted altogether, so you never have to worry about that one post that got lots of negative attention ever again.

But you cannot erase the way your audience felt when they engaged with that post, the emotions and passion that fuelled their comments and messages.

By embracing these comments, you are giving yourself an opportunity to rectify the situation far more effectively than just sweeping it under the rug ever could, and your audience will pick up on this.

Step 2: Empowering the negativity.

What I mean when I refer to “empowering” the negativity, is giving the feedback you receive from online audiences the same respect and attention you’d give feedback in any other aspect of your career.

When your manager has constructive criticism for you, it’s important to listen to that and adapt as a result.

When a client says they’re unhappy with recent performance, it’s important to listen to that and adapt as a result.

And when your social media audience responds negatively to your content?

That’s right, you must listen and adapt.

When it came to our surprisingly ill-received Christmas campaign, I spent a few days panicking, watching the comments rack up and trying to figure out how I was supposed to fix this.

I’d already written three months’ worth of social posts, already kickstarted the campaign, and all that seemed to be going to waste now because our audience just didn’t see what I did.

Thing is, I was thinking about all this in completely the wrong way.

Because it’s not about what I see; how I feel about Christmas, why I was so proud of that campaign.

It’s all about the audience – as it is with any campaign, in any comms team – and rather than trying to make them see what I do, I needed to adapt my comms to reflect what they see.

What they want, what matters to them, what they feel.

And that was really easy, because I already had hundreds of comments laying it out for me in explicit detail.

By empowering the voices of our online community and putting weight behind the comments we receive no matter how critical or abrasive, we can adapt our comms to reflect a strong, deeply personalised understanding of our audience that makes those negative comments worth it.

Step 3: Engaging with the negativity

Once you understand what your audience is trying to tell you, your next step is to do something about it.

In some ways, it can feel a bit like looking a charging bull in the eyes.

People might be emphatic, angry, inflamed by whatever topic is at hand, and you’re tackling that head on.

But, ultimately, the way in which you engage with your audience’s feedback will result in long-term improvements to your comms, and they will thank you for it.

You’ll most likely find that particular themes start to emerge once you start to analyse the comments you’ve received around a certain topic/campaign.

On the Christmas campaign, there were three core complaints; firstly, that the Markets are always made up of the same stalls, every year.

Secondly, that there aren’t enough local, home-grown traders. And thirdly, that the products are all the same and never unique.

I knew that these things aren’t true, because I’d been part of the background conversations and I met with the people who make those decisions.

To me, it almost seemed obvious just how much was on offer at the Christmas Markets, and how diverse they are.

When I received those streams of negativity after launching the campaign, it allowed me to reimagine what our key priorities should be, as a direct response to the feedback we were being given.

From there, we introduced new pieces of content to the campaign, including vox pops with new and local-based stallholders as well as storytelling narratives explaining some of those background processes, using a person-focussed approach to actively dispel our audience’s concerns.

The results spoke for themselves. With millions of people reached across our social media channels, strong engagement and a fantastic turnout at the markets, we were able to see the value of embracing, empowering, and engaging with our audience’s negative outpouring in real time.

Since then, this is something I’ve put into practice with each of our campaigns, strengthening not only our audience’s trust in us, but my confidence in myself as a comms professional… after all, if you’re regularly making sure to listen, stay reactive and improve, you can’t do much more than that.

Conclusion

The next time you find yourself in the midst of online criticism, keep calm and remember that you’re receiving a really valuable gift in that moment.

Embrace what’s happening; that means second guessing a knee jerk ‘delete’, and remembering that this is exactly what social media should be used for.

Then you can empower those comments; why are people so passionate about this issue? What do they want from you? How do they feel?

And finally, engage; tackle this feedback head-on and show your audience that you’re listening.

They will thank you for it.

Let us know how you get on.

Tag @CommsCreatives or myself directly on LinkedIn, and let us know how you’re tackling negativity in your comms.

The takeaway from today?

It’s not as scary as you think!”

Thank so much to Niamh for sharing such thoughtful and inspiring insights.

And if you have enjoyed this as much as we did, you’ll be excited to join us to pick even more of her genuis brain, as she joins our panel discussion on this very subject 👇