September 11, 2020
Social media is an excellent tool for healthcare companies and physicians to communicate with their audiences (and practices to communicate with their patients!). It's free (ish), and the people following you are usually well disposed toward you and your services.
Until they’re not.
If a follower/customer raises a concern, let them know you'll address it and then reach out on a private channel. If it's a legitimate beef, fix it and move on. Be kind, be respectful. With luck, you'll make a dissatisfied customer satisfied, and everyone lives happily ever after.
But sometimes you'll find someone who wants to be a troll. They don't have a legitimate concern and are only aching to feel empowered by raking some unsuspecting victims over the coals. And they chose you. They're making nasty and rude comments on your page, chiming in on every post with a bunch of garbage that's not relevant to you, your practice, or reality.
Once you’ve determined there’s no legitimacy to their complaint, here are a few steps you can take:
Turn off comments. You can control whether followers can comment on your posts, so if you see the conversation taking a turn for the worse, flip the off switch. Flip it back on once the hubbub dies down.
Block them or ignore them. There’s no sense getting into a knock-down, drag-out on your page. You’ll spook the innocent bystanders.
Report them to a higher power. There are people out there creating fake accounts by the thousands, so let Zuckerberg and company do the work of seeing if they’re legit.
To head off any problems, have a policy in place that guides your social media managers and lets your followers know what the expectations are. And of course, social media can be even trickier in the medical field, considering HIPAA and other regulations' demands. If you want help developing guidelines customized for your business or managing your social media, email Ben Singleton, Social Media Director.