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How to Handle Online Negativity: Recommendations for Brands and Individuals
Even if you are a charity organization, negative comments about you over time are inevitable. This is normal and shouldn't be a cause for distress. Even if your clinic miraculously heals the sick and resurrects the dead, dissatisfied people will eventually emerge, if only by chance. Such negativity, even when unfounded, can harm a business's reputation.
In this article:
Which businesses are most affected by negativity?
Experiencing negativity for the first time is undoubtedly painful. However, with time, you adapt, analyze, take action or disregard it, and continue living and working as before.
From our experience in managing online negativity, there is only a handful of sectors where negative feedback impacts business so significantly that it directly affects the bottom line.
Investments and Financial Sector
For these industries, maintaining a pristine image is crucial; investors are averse to problems. That's essentially the core of it.
Negative reviews about consumer goods like monitors, smartphones, bags, or dresses sold in supermarkets may cause some moral distress and require attention from SMM specialists, but they generally don't deal a decisive blow to businesses.
The same applies to banks, telecom operators, and service providers. There's always a steady percentage of customer churn, but there's also an inflow of new customers, professionally handled by sales departments, marketing teams, and other channels.
Medicine and Health
In this sector, reviews from dissatisfied, offended, disadvantaged, and injured individuals significantly influence the flow of new patients. When it comes to matters of the body, health, beauty, pain, and children, people tend to believe even the most implausible negative claims, just to be safe.
If a blogger undergoes lip augmentation at a plastic surgery clinic and the results are unsatisfactory, the clinic will suffer greatly. A series of videos and a torrent of criticism will follow, from which it will be difficult to recover for years. Naturally, this will be visible to all potential patients.
If a specific surgeon has even once made a mistake, they will likely see a decrease in surgeries. It will be almost impossible to clear negative reviews, even from a single dissatisfied patient. Few people book appointments without first reading clinic reviews.
From our experience in managing online negativity, there is only a handful of sectors where negative feedback impacts business so significantly that it directly affects the bottom line.
Investments and Financial Sector
For these industries, maintaining a pristine image is crucial; investors are averse to problems. That's essentially the core of it.
Negative reviews about consumer goods like monitors, smartphones, bags, or dresses sold in supermarkets may cause some moral distress and require attention from SMM specialists, but they generally don't deal a decisive blow to businesses.
The same applies to banks, telecom operators, and service providers. There's always a steady percentage of customer churn, but there's also an inflow of new customers, professionally handled by sales departments, marketing teams, and other channels.
Medicine and Health
In this sector, reviews from dissatisfied, offended, disadvantaged, and injured individuals significantly influence the flow of new patients. When it comes to matters of the body, health, beauty, pain, and children, people tend to believe even the most implausible negative claims, just to be safe.
If a blogger undergoes lip augmentation at a plastic surgery clinic and the results are unsatisfactory, the clinic will suffer greatly. A series of videos and a torrent of criticism will follow, from which it will be difficult to recover for years. Naturally, this will be visible to all potential patients.
If a specific surgeon has even once made a mistake, they will likely see a decrease in surgeries. It will be almost impossible to clear negative reviews, even from a single dissatisfied patient. Few people book appointments without first reading clinic reviews.
How to prevent online negativity?
In no way. Prevention is key.
Focus on appealing to a cultivated audience: those capable of filtering information and recognizing professionalism.
One preventive measure could be a complete refusal to collaborate with celebrities and influencers. This approach can shield you from potential scandals associated with them. However, the potential benefits may not outweigh the lost opportunities.
Focus on appealing to a cultivated audience: those capable of filtering information and recognizing professionalism.
One preventive measure could be a complete refusal to collaborate with celebrities and influencers. This approach can shield you from potential scandals associated with them. However, the potential benefits may not outweigh the lost opportunities.
Ineffective methods of removing online negativity
Search engines quickly rank negative content in the top results, aided by strong behavioral factors. The only way to overcome this is with more significant, positive sensations.
Paying to remove publications is a dead-end strategy. If you do this once with any resource, you'll either be charged a subscription fee, or they'll start adding negative content to other sites in their network: remove it from one, add it to another.
Attempting to create positivity instead of negativity on such platforms is often futile. You'll be playing on their territory, and the site owners have no interest in improving your reputation for free.
Paying to remove publications is a dead-end strategy. If you do this once with any resource, you'll either be charged a subscription fee, or they'll start adding negative content to other sites in their network: remove it from one, add it to another.
Attempting to create positivity instead of negativity on such platforms is often futile. You'll be playing on their territory, and the site owners have no interest in improving your reputation for free.
How to properly remove negativity from search results
Displace negativity with new publications on other sites. Create fresh content about yourself and your work on new platforms.
The sites used for displacing negativity from search results don't need to be highly authoritative. They can be ordinary, yet still be indexed effectively for branded queries if the titles of the placements contain the keywords you need.
The goal of displacement is to diversify the search results to create a balanced representation. In the top 20 results, there may still be 1-2 sites that are undesirable for you, such as judicial directories.
However, strike a balance: ensure that those who genuinely want to learn about you and your work can do so without looking beyond the top 20 results. To push negative materials beyond the top 20, aim to create 30-40 positive placements. If your publications receive good engagement metrics, this will significantly boost their visibility.
The sites used for displacing negativity from search results don't need to be highly authoritative. They can be ordinary, yet still be indexed effectively for branded queries if the titles of the placements contain the keywords you need.
The goal of displacement is to diversify the search results to create a balanced representation. In the top 20 results, there may still be 1-2 sites that are undesirable for you, such as judicial directories.
However, strike a balance: ensure that those who genuinely want to learn about you and your work can do so without looking beyond the top 20 results. To push negative materials beyond the top 20, aim to create 30-40 positive placements. If your publications receive good engagement metrics, this will significantly boost their visibility.
Key Takeaways
Online negativity is inevitable for active businesses and individuals. Some sectors, particularly medicine and finance, are more vulnerable to the impacts of negative feedback.
- Prevention is the best strategy for managing online negativity.
- Paying to remove negative content or trying to counter it on the same platforms is generally ineffective.
- The most effective approach is to create new, positive content on various platforms to displace negative results in search engines.
- Aim for a balanced online presence that provides a fair representation of your brand or personal reputation.
- Utilize reputable business listing platforms like GoodFirms to enhance your online presence and counteract negative search results.
- For specialized industries like SaaS, consider working with targeted marketing agencies to create an effective SaaS Marketing strategy.
Victor Nosenko
Victor Nosenko is a managing director at Advertisie. Since the start of his career in 2017 he advanced from the position of a creative copywriter to the marketing lead role. Focuses on strategic marketing, media buying and project management. Holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in management.
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