Everyone knows hate harms people, but few people are aware that hate directly harms the bottom line too. You don’t need to accept that anymore. New solutions exist.

How hate hits your customers and your bottom line

Customer experiences increasingly take place across multiple channels, many of them not “owned” by the organisation. Obvious examples include Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. All are now woven into various stages of the customer’s journey.

The problem is that these channels are becoming increasingly toxic, which is having a significant negative affect on customers and your business. Research by charity Ditch the Label found that online hate speech in the UK and US rose by 20% since the start of the pandemic.

Right now, someone who follows one of your branded social accounts is free to openly abuse you or another individual in your community. This is more common than people think. Research by the Oxford Internet Survey revealed that 1 in 5 people in the UK have experienced online abuse. And 2 in 5 have witnessed that abuse. This has an obvious negative impact on the victim, but a less obvious impact on those that witness it.

2021 research by Insider Intelligence found that 37% of social media users are very or much less likely to engage with online content in an unsafe online environment. So a third of customers are being so turned off by toxic content in your social community that they’re leaving the conversation. If you consider that social commerce sales, that is the value of products and sold directly through social media channels, is worth $165 billion globally, you quickly realise that hate is jeopardising billions in potential revenue.

What you can do about it today

The days of social networks being a free-for-all are coming to an end. More and more individuals and organisations are take back control of their social communities, choosing to educate their followers in positive engagement and create the positive communities that create long-term fans and loyal customers.

Here are five things you can do to protect your bottom line:

1. Track the hate in your community – before you take action it’s important to know what you’re getting. What type of hate is in your community? Who is being targeted? What impact is it happening. You can do this through keyword searches. Some social listening platforms can provide basic insight, but most lack the sophistication to pick out the nuances of hate and toxicity
2. Manually moderate your channels – help your teams to identify the hate and toxic content, and provide them with moderation tools to remove them in quick time. However beware, as toxicity increases many social moderation teams are becoming overwhelmed by the volume of content. Others are left dealing with the mental health impacts of moderating such toxic content. Managing team wellbeing is important.
3. Make use of the tools provided by the social networks – all the major networks have features that you can switch on to protect your channels, and they’re worth studying. However they are somewhat limited in what they can do, and can be time-consuming to set up and manage if you are active across many of them
4. Work with your community to reduce the negative content – create a Community Social Media policy that clearly states what behaviour won’t be tolerated, and why you’re making the change. More and more organisations are doing this. However, make sure you have a way of enforcing it, or it may not be taken seriously.
5. Use a service like Arwen.ai – Arwen.ai automatically tracks your social accounts, using artificial intelligence to identify 23 types of hate, which it can then remove in sub-second time. It makes moderation teams 75% more productive. It creates a safe social environment for your community and customers.

To find out more about how by visiting our FAQs or request a free trial here.