So how do you deal with customer complaints in a public forum like Facebook or Twitter?

The best way to deal with this situation is to turn it into a positive experience for the customers – which will help your business greatly as well.

So here are a few steps that will help you deal with negative feedback from your customers:

#1: Find out what the issue is

Before responding in defense, first find out why the customer has decided to leave negative feedback. In most cases, it will either be because he or she is looking for a solution or the product or service is faulty and needs to be dealt with.

However, if you feel that the comment is unjustified and isn’t legitimate, then you can feel free to ignore the message.

#2: Respond in a calm and understanding manner and as soon as possible

Whatever you do, being defensive or even deleting the comment is just not the way to go. Customers will notice this almost immediately. In responding to the message in a calm, understanding manner (if you have to) can defuse the situation but work in your favor. And if it’s serious, fix the problem immediately. When you respond immediately to negative feedback, customers will know that you do care about their business.

#3: Respond immediately and involve your customers if need be

It is a good practice to send out surveys to your customers regularly. Involving them in the process of improvement will have great benefit for their business. Also, this will eliminate the complaints that might surface publicly as well.

There are certain attributes of social media that will remain for a long time to come. Keeping these in mind will help you use this powerful mode of networking effectively, and to your advantage as you learn more and more about the ‘reach’ that it offer.

Firstly, social media is simple. All it takes is a simple 5-minute installation or even a few clicks to open a social media account. But this simplicity means that almost anyone can open one of these accounts and making a noise about their product or service. So, what should be the area of focus is how you use social media to make people come back every time for your inputs.

Secondly, social media is a lot about how you apply common sense in communication because it’s really how you talk with someone with the exception that the medium through which you talk to people is very different. So, what you need to keep in mind is that the way you communicate online should be similar to the way you communicate offline because what you say is interpreted by human beings.

Finally, you must remember that using social media to get your message out puts you in the spotlight where each social media community responds to a message differently. Understanding your audience is paramount to being able to get a positive response every time. Also, remember to understand that a lack of transparency will often say much more than you could possibly think. For example, deleting negative feedback from a customer can result in bad press that you can do without.

According to the new Pew Internet survey, it has been found that almost two-thirds of adults use social media sites. While this might be an obvious statistics looking at the way job hunting has evolved over the last few years, it might be a barrier for people who are older than 50 years of age.

One of the many reasons why employers are reluctant to hire seniors for any job position is because of their apparent lack of understanding of technology.

Here are a few tips which will help you not only get on the social media bandwagon but also improve your chances of getting a job:

Tip #1: LinkedIn Membership

According to experts, this is one of the most popular tools that are used by companies to look for prospective employees. So, if you want to thrive in a market where finding a job is tough, using a social media site such as LinkedIn ensures that you will be found by several companies. Make sure you connect with people every day.

Tip #2: Use the SimplyHired “Who do I know?” tool

SimplyHired is a search engine that allows you to look for current vacant positions in various fields but there’s another way by which you can use this tool far more effectively. If you use the “Who Do I Know” tool, you’ll find that it will throw up data when connected with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts showing you which Contacts that you have work for that company in the present or have done so in the past.

Tip #3: Open a Twitter and Facebook account

Not only can you follow several companies and other people’s tweets but you can also participate in online job chats as well. The informality and ease of use makes Twitter an excellent site to look for jobs. When it comes to Facebook, highlighting your work experience as well as your academic qualification can also ensure that you get a lot of assistance from your ‘network’ in finding a job according to your skills.

According the social media monitoring site Pingdom, both males and females use social media sites equally while almost 61 percent of Facebook users alone are above the age of 37 years of age. If that’s not enough, it’s not just teens or those in their twenties who are on social media sites but there is an even spread of people across varying nationalities or ages and so on and so forth.

By virtue of these statistics, you can imagine how important it is for you, especially if you run an ecommerce business, to make your presence felt at these various social media sites since most of your customers are there as well.

So here are a few social media marketing tips that an entrepreneur of an ecommerce business can benefit largely from:

#1: Use sites that most (if not all) of your customers use

There are numerous social media sites that you can use in order to sell your products but what if your target audience doesn’t need your product? For this, there are several ways to find out where most of your customers are and you can do this by asking them, monitoring the social media sites or even the business that your competitor generates from customers using this tool.

#2: Know what your competitors are doing

Knowing your competition will help you to stay on top of them, and this means, knowing which sites they are on, how many followers they have, what kind of products they promote and what type of content they publish on these sites. That will tell you what you need to do when it comes to your own social media marketing strategy.

#3:  Don’t just push products or services

Pushing products by using these social media sites can turn off your customers instead of attracting them to your page. It’s important that as a company you should be able to keep your customers updated with the latest information in the news related to your field or your compant, provide freebies by writing information on a blog or even asking your followers to participate in a discussion using a poll.

Let’s say that you have a business to run, and are interested in spreading the word using the social media wave that has stormed into our lives. There’s no doubt that this is one of the best ways by which you can promote your business but it isn’t fun anymore when keeping up with the updates takes up most of your day apart from other business-related tasks.

Yes, unless you have help in the form of colleagues who can take care of this all day long, the objective is for you to get as much exposure as possible by using this beneficial method of social media marketing by investing as little time as possible.

So here are a few social media marketing tips that you should keep in mind for this year:

#1: Decide how much time you want to spend on these activities

Decide how much time you would want to spend on social media marketing as it can get addictive, and you might get behind the offline tasks related to your business in the bargain. This is where timekeeping software can come in handy in helping you to keeping time.

#2: Pick the best social media sites

From experience, it has been determined that Facebook and Twitter are the two most beneficial sites that can be used to promote your business. Think about which social media sites you clients use, and then get started in making your presence felt ‘well’.

#3: Activate buttons for sharing

Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Digg are excellent ways by which you can allow your readers or customers to share your work with other that might be interested by it. All you need to do is activate these buttons that you will find will share your work across several sites.

Kanye West who has over 450,000 twitter followers and was not following anyone himself, suddently picked one random person to follow last Friday (July 31, 2010). This lucky person is a 19 year old student from England named Steven Holmes, who is not thrilled with the sudden fame. At first, he says, it was fun, but he started getting many calls from reporters, including CNN, BBC and New York Magazine that wanted to interview him. He also been contacted by many individuals who are trying to get Kanye’s attention for business purposes, such sending him demo tapes of their music.

Steven Holmes, who goes by Twitter ID “ste_101″, wrote on his Twitter “”Holy *&$% bro thx for following!” Kanye replied: “You are the chosen one dun dun dun dun.”

The British student has seen his followers grow to over 5000 due to this sudden fame. However, he posted: “This has been completely surreal and I really have no desire for this attention i’m just a normal person. I won’t be speaking to anybody else, surprisingly not everyone wants to be famous. That’s all I’m saying – peace out x.”

Many Twitter users who are business oriented or run businesses are trying to grow their followers, mainly for marketing purposes. The other day I ran into a company that does social media marketing services and can help with building twitter followers. They are called iClimber. Check out their website at www.iclimber.com.