Tired of dealing with negative YouTube comments?
One of the biggest hurdles all YouTubers face on a regular basis is comments from haters and trolls. The more popular channels have it worse, and most YouTubers have to devote a significant amount of time and energy responding to them. These comments not only affect YouTubers themselves but their friends and families as well.
But as the old showbiz saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Negative comments are also an indicator that your videos are doing well and receiving more engagements. But a higher engagement rate is not effective if people form a negative perception from the comments section.
So, how do you deal with this problem effectively? In this article, you’ll learn 5 effective ways to deal with negative comments on Youtube.
Just Be Yourself and Stick to Your Guns
This tip might sound corny, but very important if you want to be YouTuber. The main reason YouTubers are so popular is because of their individual styles and opinions. And when you have strong opinions on YouTube, you’ll always get confronted by people with opposing views.
It doesn’t matter who you’re, what you look like, your age, or the color of your skin- you can’t do anything to prevent people from making negative comments. Once you instill this mindset, you’ll find that dealing with and ignoring negative comments from haters and trolls become much easier.
Filter the Negative Comments You Want to Respond To
Many forums and blogs will tell you that the best way to deal with haters and trolls is to not respond to them. While ignoring them can work to a certain extent, doing so can hurt your credibility and channel engagement in the long run. If you leave a question or constructive criticism unanswered, people who later see that comment will assume you’re not knowledgeable or have weak opinions.
The trick is to filter out the constructive criticisms from the outright insulting ones. Once these have been filtered out, take your time to answer the comments you want to respond to.
Request YouTube to Block IP Addresses
Comments that are personal attacks, hateful, and racist are usually flagged as spam or reported to YouTube by content creators. This often tends to be a temporary solution, as haters and trolls can just open up a new account or use an alternative one to post keep making negative comments.
The best way to deal with hateful or spam comments from a particular individual is to request YouTube to block that particular user’s IP on your channel. This ensures that those users can’t interact with your future videos and become a nuisance again.
Turn Off the Comment Notifications
Unless you want to be constantly stressed out by haters and trolls, turn off the comment notifications. When someone says something negative on YouTube, they want you to engage with them and wear you out. Instead of falling for this cheap trick, set aside a particular time of the day to respond to comments. You will have full access to all comments from your dashboard, so there’s no reason to respond to comments in real-time.
Following this tactic will help you a lot in shrugging off trolls and haters whose sole intent is to instigate a rash response in the first place. In many instances, haters and spammers give up if you don’t interact with their comments in a couple of hours.
Hire Someone Who Knows How to Deal with Negative Comments
If you have a busy schedule, you can always hire a social media manager to respond to user comments, hateful or not. This can work against you if you’re an individual YouTuber, but if you’re running a brand channel, this is an excellent solution.
Unlike individual content channels, brands can create preset responses for negative comments based on hard data. This allows for a professional approach to negative and spam comments without creating controversies or negative perceptions.
Dealing with negativity is never an easy job, and in a platform where sensationalism is the main currency, its impossible to avoid. The best you can do is deal with hateful and spam comments in a smart manner so that it doesn’t hurt your channel’s growth. Hopefully, the tricks discussed above will help you do just that.
