You will be able to decide whether to reply, hide, delete or take a comment private, and do it calmly.
Farah opens her phone one morning to a comment on her latest video: "Ordered two weeks ago, still haven't received anything, and nobody answers my messages. Don't buy from here." Her stomach drops. Her first instinct is to delete it before anyone sees. Her second is to reply with a long, defensive explanation.
Neither is the best move. This lesson gives you a calm way to decide what to do with any difficult comment, so you are not making it up when you are upset.
A genuine complaint from a real customer is not an attack on your account. It is a customer with a problem, in public. How you handle it is visible to everyone who reads the comments, including people deciding whether to buy from you.
A perfect feed with no complaints can look too good to be true. A feed with the occasional complaint, each answered promptly and politely, shows that something real happens when things go wrong. Many buyers find that more reassuring than silence.
So reply in public, briefly and calmly. Acknowledge the problem, apologise for the experience without arguing about the details, and say what you will do. "I'm sorry, that's not the experience we want you to have. I've sent you a message to sort out your order today." Then do it.
Avoid explaining at length in public, blaming the courier or the customer, or debating who said what. Even if you are right, a long argument in the comments makes you look worse.
Order numbers, addresses, phone numbers, payment details and anything else that identifies the customer belong in a private conversation, never in public comments. Under the PDPA, Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act, organisations have obligations to protect the personal data they collect and use. Posting a customer's details in a reply, or asking them to post theirs, works against that.
So the public reply says you are moving it to private, and the private message deals with the specifics. If a customer posts their own phone number or address in a comment, consider hiding the comment and telling them privately that you have done it to protect their details. For your own obligations, the Personal Data Protection Commission's website has guides for small businesses.
Farah's reply did exactly this. The public comment got two calm sentences. The private message asked for the order details, found that the parcel had been stuck with the courier, and arranged a replacement. The customer later added a comment saying it had been sorted.
Not every difficult comment is a complaint. Some are spam, scams, abuse or the same person posting nastiness again and again. These do not deserve a reply.
Most platforms give you moderation tools: hiding a comment, deleting it, restricting or blocking an account, filtering comments that contain words you choose, and reporting accounts. Learn where these are in the apps you use before you need them. The exact options vary by platform.
Hide or delete spam, links to suspicious sites, scam messages and abuse. Block accounts that keep coming back. Report accounts that pretend to be you or that target your followers with scams, which lesson 7.4 covers. None of this is censorship. It is keeping the space safe and useful for the people you actually serve.
Be careful not to hide genuine complaints just because they are uncomfortable. Customers notice when a complaint disappears, and it often comes back louder, sometimes in a review or a screenshot shared elsewhere.
Sometimes a comment states something that is simply wrong: about your product, your prices, or your field. "Eggless cakes can't hold fondant." "All tuition centres in Singapore follow the same syllabus." Leaving it unanswered lets it stand. Arguing with it for twenty replies makes things worse.
Correct it once, politely, with a source if you can point to one. "Actually, we make eggless fondant cakes most weeks. Here's one from last Saturday." Or "Most centres follow the MOE syllabus for each level, but the way they teach it differs a lot." Then stop. If the person keeps arguing, let them. Other readers have seen your correction and can judge for themselves.
The reason to write rules is that difficult comments arrive at the worst moments, when you are tired or busy or upset. With rules written in advance, you do not have to decide on the spot. You check the rule and act on it.
In the activity you will write your moderation rules: what you reply to, what you hide, what you delete, and what you take to direct messages.
Write your moderation rules: what you reply to, what you hide, what you delete, and what you take to direct messages.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).