If your business has ever received a negative review on Facebook, Twitter or any of the other popular social media networks, you've probably asked yourself: "Can I delete bad reviews on social media?"
It depends on the platform. LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram allow you to hide or delete damaging recommendations and comments, but Facebook doesn't allow you to remove bad reviews and Twitter gives you no option to control how people respond to your tweets.
Trying to remove poor reviews is usually a waste of time anyway; if a customer is unhappy enough to leave a review in the first place, there's nothing to stop them posting a review somewhere else if you do succeed in getting it deleted.
Of course, there are always exceptions. Some reviews are clearly fake and are designed to mislead potential buyers, while some are threatening or abusive in nature. Such reviews and comments should always be reported and removed.
In most cases, your best course of action is to try to turn a negative review into a positive experience. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you do your best to resolve your customers' concerns rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet, you'll be showing potential customers that you care.
Managing bad reviews on Facebook
You can't simply delete Facebook reviews on an individual level in the same way you can hide or delete negative comments on your Facebook Page.
You can, however, disable the reviews feature entirely, which will effectively hide all of the reviews on your Page and prevent people from leaving new ones. If you would like to disable Facebook reviews, do the following:
- On your Facebook news feed, click on the "Pages" tab in the side menu;
- On your Page, click on the "Settings" tab;
- Click on the "Templates and Tabs" option; and then
- Find the "Reviews" option and disable it.
Before disabling this feature, it's worth remembering that deactivating reviews will remove all current ratings from your Page. While this will hide bad reviews, it might actually do more harm than good - especially when consumers are looking for social proof to make an informed purchase decision.
Managing negative comments on Twitter
Twitter isn't nearly as sophisticated as Facebook when it comes to managing content, and there's no way to delete a negative comment on your tweet.
The only option available to you is to delete the tweet. But even that may not be enough to remove unwanted comments; if other people have retweeted your tweet with a comment of their own, their tweets won't be deleted.
Mentions can't be deleted either. This is partly down to the way in which Twitter works: as they've said it on their own Twitter stream and have just used an "@" symbol to show they’re mentioning you, you have no control over their content.
Should you even bother deleting bad reviews?
In my opinion, no. A bad review gives you an opportunity to respond in a positive way, which demonstrates that you care and want to resolve your customer's problem rather than just ignoring it.
Some people will always be unhappy no matter what you say or do, but you could still create a positive relationship with unhappy customers if you deal with their issues in the right way.
