Together with great benefits that social media brings, it can also be challenging. Social media can bring negative comments, often with good reason. But how do you tell the difference between a valid negative comment and a troll? When is a comment worth responding to or when is it not?

This infographic is extremely useful in giving you a decision tree for when and if to respond. Beyond this businesses need to look at how feedback from social media can help an organisation by changing business practices and identify opportunities.

A couple of extra things to consider:

• Never respond in anger (or after alcohol?). If the comment has annoyed you then maybe write down what you want to say, walk away and come back when you have calmed to see if what you were going to say still stands.
• Be the better person. Others will read the comment and your response and you need them to come away thinking that you are being more reasonable.
• Remember people don’t necessarily believe overly negative comments, and sometimes will come to your defence when people are unreasonable.
• Keep perspective. Many of the worse trolls on Twitter have very few followers and even follow themselves from other accounts to give themselves some following. Even if someone has a few hundred followers the number who will see the post will be tiny – by responding you could be giving a troll a much bigger audience.