“PB125: Tips on How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers” plus 1 more

PB125: Tips on How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers

Posted: 20 Jun 2016 02:00 AM PDT

Handling Critical Comments and Attacks from Blog Readers

In my recent podcast on the characteristics of successful blogging, I touched on the topic a couple of times of putting yourself out there for public comment and critique.

I suggested that having a bit of a thick skin might be useful because from time to time you'll definitely get 'feedback' that may not be as a encouraging, helpful or constructive as it could be – and which at times may even enter into the territory of it being aggressive, attacking and personal.

While I've only experienced this a handful of times in over 10 years the times that it has happened to me have rocked my world a little.

So how should a blogger deal with criticism of their blogging? That's what this episode is all about!

In Today's Episode How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers

Embrace it – When you're critiqued there is potential for growth from the encounter. Feedback of any type is a sign that someone has noticed what you're doing and reading your blog.
Consider the critique – When I get a negative comment, I try to step back and do a bit of analysis of what's going on. Here are a few questions I consider:
- Is the comment within the boundaries of what I think is acceptable for my blog?
- Is there some truth in it? Are there some improvements you can make?
- Is there a misunderstanding you can clarify?
- Is this something I've heard before? Is there a common theme to the critiques?
- Is this from someone who I have interacted before? Were they having a bad day or is this ongoing?
- Was there anything positive? Is there common ground you can focus on?
- Is this a troll or someone seeking attention?
- Is the feedback anonymous? Is it a trouble maker or someone you know?
- What is the intent of the critique?
- Are there any signals that can give you context for the commenters situation? Sometimes looking at the links to their blog/social, previous comments or things said in the comment can give you an understanding of the agenda of the person.

A lot of this is about trying to get to the heart of what's going on with the comment. For me a lot of it comes down to trying to understand the intent of the other person and trying to respond to that rather than just the words that they've chosen to use.

Sometimes behind the words that come across as a personal attack is something that you can take on board to learn from/improve what you do or the opportunity to help your reader and make a positive connection.

Of course it's not always easy to do this.

You may need to give yourself a little time/distance (although you may need to act faster if things are blowing up). Step away from the computer!

You might also find it helpful to involve another person. Ask a friend, family member, another blogger for their take. Sometimes someone who is outside the situation can reveal something about the feedback that you're not seeing.

Respond – With analysis and feedback, you are in a better position to respond. I have taken a few options to respond.

Responding to trolls
- Delete it – I rarely delete negative comments but on occasion if a comment is left by someone who is obviously trolling and doing so in an offensive way I'll delete it.
- Ignore it – If the feedback comes on social media and its troll like I usually ignore it.
- Overly polite kindness – Sometimes I take a kill them with kindness type response. I don't tend to do this so much these days – it is a little passive aggressive but it can be effective at times.

If there's even some hint that the person is coming from a non-troll place I will respond with these options:

Clarification – Maybe they misunderstood your point, clarify blog post
Take responsibility – If you've made an error, take responsibility
Debate – A robust discussion can benefit both sides
Agree to Disagree – If the comment is in a very closed manner, debate won't work, be constructive but agree to disagree
Private responses – If they are intent on a non-constructive heated exchange, try to end it and offer a private conversation
- Many times these invitations go ignored which to me signals some of the intent of the other person.
- The times that the person does followup, I'm always willing to engage as they may have some genuine issue that they are looking for resolution around.
- In most cases, we're able to come to some resolution but there have been a couple of occasions where we still come to an impasse and you need to disengage.
Respond with Genuine Care – Sometimes, you can tell from the comment/feedback that the other person is operating from pain/hurt. Sometimes emailing them simply to say that you noticed their comment and wanted to see if everything was ok can be the right response.
- If I've had other positive interactions with the person in the past and their comment seems out of character
- If their blog/social/comment shows that they're going through something
- Many times when I do this I find that the person is going through something personally. Many times, they apologise and the fact that you responded with genuine kindness/care strengthens the relationship.
Let the Community Respond – Sometimes the community notices and responds.

Lastly – there are many times where the person's negativity says more about the other person and their situation than it says anything about you or what you've written.

"Thank you for your 'gift' – but I think you can keep it for yourself."

Further Resources on How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers

How did you go with today's episode?

I would love to hear your feedback on this particular issue. Please feel free to respond and let me know when you disagree. Let's have a discussion on this topic.

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The post PB125: Tips on How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers appeared first on ProBlogger Podcast.

Why Boosting Facebook Posts Is Not So Bad After All

Posted: 19 Jun 2016 10:02 PM PDT

By ProBlogger SME Samantha Jockel.

When I think back over the past six years I have been using Facebook as a business tool, there have been moments of exhilaration and despair.

In the early days, we experienced incredible growth on some of our Facebook pages – growing thousands of people overnight without a dollar spent. And then there was this word algorithm that started to pop up, which is when dread began to set in.

This fantastic platform that we had been using for years to gain an amazing audience for our business became less and less accessible as the days went by. Then Facebook ads came along and at that point I thought it was the beginning of the end.

I know in business it is best not to put all of your eggs in the one basket and we have tried very hard to build other ways of connecting with our audience outside of Facebook, however the more we look at the data the more we know Facebook is where our people engage.

I remember feeling anger at Facebook for quite some time. All of a sudden they had taken away our capacity to communicate to this amazing community we had built because they wanted our money.

I understood they were a business trying to make money as any business would, but I was still annoyed. After I got over myself and my rage I was faced with the option of trying to work out this new Facebook challenge that was sitting in front of me or give up. I am not one to give up!

Three of the pages I ran had rather large Facebook following: Suburbly (367,000), School Mum (328,000) and Aldi Mum (115,000). This meant when I initially started looking at boosting posts, I was faced with options between $200-$1000 per post which was a huge amount of money for us for one post.

Despite all of the struggle around organic reach, our pages still performed quite well due to our audience being highly engaged.

We were lucky to have built such large numbers before reach was restricted so even though our average post did not reach anywhere near our total page likers, we still reached a significant amount of people.

Having said that of late we have noticed the Facebook algorithms getting smarter at picking up sponsored content and shout outs to sponsored posts on our blog.

Ultimately they want in on the action and from a business point of view I can understand that.

So the conundrum was that sponsored posts are the posts we want to do really well to continue to secure brands being interested in working with us, however their reach seemed to be impacted at times.

So here is what I have learnt playing with boosting posts on Facebook over the past year.

1. Audiences

Firstly, we have learnt that different audiences cost different amounts to boost to.

Due to running a number of different Facebook pages with different demographics, we have learnt that depending on who you are targeting will change the cost significantly.

On one of our pages we can spend $100 and reach up to 30,000 people and on the other we could pay $100 and be lucky to reach 2000. Initially we thought there was a glitch with the page and e-mailed Facebook on a number of occasions about it but every time they told us this particular audience was more sought after so they were more expensive to reach.

2. Popularity

How much it costs to boost depends on how popular the post is.

We have noticed that when we boost a popular post, our dollars go much further than when we boost a post that is not performing as well.

Again, this is logical, however it is good to know that you will get much better value for money boosting posts if your people are engaging the content.

3. Money Well Spent

Boosting a post can be cheaper than paying for your time or another writer's time to produce more content for traffic.

Content, content and more content is the story of our life.

For us, we have traffic targets for our weekly content on the blog that we need to hit to maintain consistent website traffic.

Creating this content either costs us in our time or we may pay a contributor to produce some content for us. Sometimes I swear a piece of content is going to go gangbusters and then for some reason it doesn't get Facebook reach. My intuition tells me that if we can just get it out there off it will go.

In these moments I do the math and realise that boosting a post is cheaper to bring website traffic than spending my time writing more content or paying for another contributor to write an article. So we boost and 9 times out of 10 we are right.

Sometimes I will boost a post that has performed really well already because I know the boost will perform and the traffic from that is genuine and so much cheaper than the time it would take me to write another piece of content.

4. Taking time off

Boosting is great when you want to have a holiday.

Realising this was the moment that I fell in love with boosting posts.

When you live your life on the content creation train it feels like there is never time for a break. Social media and website content is 24/7.

One of the magical things about boosting is if you want to take a holiday and keep up the traffic to your website then you can by posting a few of your best performing posts from last year and boosting them.

Sure it will cost you some money but it will be less than paying for content and you can take a well-deserved break knowing that the traffic is still coming in.

5. Sponsored Post Success

You can be confident that you can get traffic to your sponsored posts.

Knowing that I can boost our sponsored posts for clients gives me the confidence that we can guarantee value for the brands that we work with as we can guarantee the hits.

No more fingers crossed that Facebook will give us reach for that post as we know we can always boost it and we generally never create content we know our audience won't be interested so the challenge is just getting it in front of them so they can engage it.

As you can see I have done a full 180 in terms of my attitude towards boosting posts and feel like it is not so bad after all as it gives us the confidence to know that we can get our content in front of people, we just might have to budget that in.

Sam Jockel founded ALDI Mum in 2011 and cofounded School Mum, Suburbly and The Holidaying Family in the years to follow with a total Facebook community of over 800,000 followers. She spends half of her life looking at analytics to help inform the next step.

The post Why Boosting Facebook Posts Is Not So Bad After All appeared first on ProBlogger.

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