#SocialSpin: Are you inadvertently feeding the trolls?

​If your audience are reacting badly to something you’ve posted, you might be tempted to delete it. Instantly.

But unless you’ve done something majorly wrong, you’d do better to leave it — deleting a post makes you look guilty. Besides, it’s likely somebody’s taken a screenshot already, so you can’t exactly pretend it didn’t happen. You might want to forget, but your angry customers won’t. 

We’ll be talking about the best ways to apologize in a couple of weeks, but in the mean time, let’s focus on how to avoid making things worse. If there are trolls involved, and you haven’t actually done anything wrong, this is really important.

Essentially, trolls are bullies. They target people and businesses who they think are weak, or whose response is likely to entertain them. 

More than anything, trolls want a reaction out of you. Unfortunately, unlike with real-life bullies, standing up to them won’t do you any good at all. Luckily, though, you can deal with most low-level trolls by banning or blocking them. Here’s how:

For Facebook, go into your Page, and choose “Settings” from the banner up the top. You’ll see this:

by Lily Bradic

This week in #SocialSpin, we’ll be talking about what you can do once you’ve noticed that the online conversation is starting to spiral out of control — and what to do if you’ve been accidentally fueling the fire.