The 5-Word Reply to Rude Comments

Ever freeze up when you get a critical comment on your videos? I’ve been there! Today, I’m revealing my go-to five-word reply that ends the drama and keeps your brand strong: “Thank you for your feedback.” We’ll talk about why you shouldn’t rush to delete negative comments, how to respond with confidence, and why your audience is watching how you handle pushback. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Oh, this is almost too good to be true because in the time that I decided to make a video on this exact topic and the time that I'm sitting down to record it, I did in fact use these five words as a response to a critical comment. Let's talk about the five-word response that you can reply to any critical comment on your YouTube videos or anywhere on social media without sounding like a witch, without sounding defensive, and without getting all into like the drama. If you're new here, my name is Meredith. I'm here to help you look good, sound good, and feel good on camera. I'm here to help you build your binge-worthy video brand. And part of that means you have to show up as a human on the internet. You have to show up as a human on camera and be yourself. Be like the most you that you can be. And so when you get a negative comment or an opposing opinion or pushback or somebody just criticizing what you're saying and telling you that you're wrong, it can sometimes feel like they are attacking you, the person. Most of the time they're not. And I want to talk about that. But first, let me share with you what the five words are. I don't want to keep you in suspense. The five words you can respond are thank you for your feedback. It's a complete sentence, it is diplomatic, it is unwitchy, it is un-drama. It's you ending the conversation on your terms. It's you getting the last word. It's a little bit of, I like to think of it as a little bit of a shield to say, nope, we're done because I decided we're done. Without explaining or justifying or letting the conversation continue. Now, are there other things that you can respond? Absolutely, of course. And I've been known to clap back, snap back if I see a negative comment before I have my coffee in the morning. But I want to talk about a couple of different scenarios of negative comments or critical comments, pushback, or just like what you might see as a troll in your comments, because I think how you handle those and the different situations that might arise play a role in building your personal brand and establishing who you are to your audience and to your clients and customers. And I think this is so important because I think there's this like natural tendency as a human who like if you're here making YouTube videos, you have a business, you're you're uh you're educating your audience, you're the go-to person in your niche, you're establishing your expertise. You don't want someone barging in and like announcing to the world that you're wrong, right? You don't want someone barging in and saying, Well, she doesn't know what she's talking about. You're trying to control the narrative. This is your channel, this is your brand, this is your content. And so the natural response for for many people, for myself, for my clients, the natural response is, oh, I better delete this. I better delete the comment before my audience sees it. It's embarrassing to have a negative comment or like a critical comment or somebody telling you that you're wrong in your comments. Like that feels kind of embarrassing, but then it feels embarrassing to even just that it exists on your channel. It's like, get this off of there. I don't want people to see this. But I think before you hit the button to delete and block them from your channel, you have to ask yourself the question of what does this comment really actually mean? Because most of the time it's just an opinion. You're a stranger on the internet, they're a stranger on the internet. People love sharing their opinions on the internet, especially like behind an anonymous username. No one can see them, no one knows their name. You know, the keyboard warrior, as we call them, right? Sometimes people can't resist stating their opinion, especially if they think that they're right and you're wrong. But oftentimes that's all it is, is an opinion. So where this gets interesting is that not all of these comments are the same. Sometimes somebody shares an opinion with you and they're right. Somebody might come in your comment section and say, hey, um, like your audio sounds really bad. It's really hard to hear your video. Or there's something going on like in the background that's like distracting, or something like that. They could be giving you actual feedback, like legitimate feedback that you can change or fix to improve your content. Sometimes they say things like you talk too fast or you talk too much, or it's something that you're like, well, I can't change that. Just don't watch my videos. What are you thinking? Why would you leave that comment, right? That was one of the first negative comments that I ever got on YouTube. Back when I was like a baby, like a baby YouTube creator who didn't really know that people would come on and leave negative comments for a complete stranger who's just like out here doing her best. And I remember the physical sensations in my body when I read that comment, you talk too much. It felt like the inside of my skin felt like dozens of red fire ants had just like been deployed to the underside of my skin across my whole entire body, down to my toes, I could feel my skin melting. That's how it felt. Because somebody said you talk too much. And now looking back, I can totally see how easy, how easily I could have said, you know what? Screw this. Why am I doing this? Why am I making YouTube videos? If someone's gonna come on here and criticize how much I talk as a human being on YouTube, I'm not gonna do this then. It would have been so easy to say, forget it, I'm just gonna stick to blogging. And then we wouldn't be here. We this wouldn't be happening. Instead, I chose to see that negative comment as an opportunity to ask myself, why did it feel like your skin was melting, Meredith? Why did getting a negative comment feel the way that it felt? Like, what is what's going on? What's going on in there? And I sat with it and I explored it and I asked myself, why like why did it feel that way? Why did it hit me like that? Why did it feel like fire ants were attacking me from the inside out? Like what I came to, and I'll share this with you, but what I what I want you to explore for yourself is think about a critical comment, a negative comment, like something you can't change about yourself that you may have gotten on your videos before, or that you may be afraid is going to happen when you publish your videos. And I want you to explore in the same way that I did, which is why does this feel like a problem? Why does this feel like such a roadblock? Why did you have such a crazy physical reaction to this comment? And just see what comes up for you. For me, it was like the quiet, shy little girl inside of me was like, I told you, you shouldn't have opened your mouth, you shouldn't have made YouTube videos. What were you thinking? No one wants to hear what you have to say. Are you kidding me? Just shut it, right? The little girl inside was like, of course, of course somebody would say that. Like, no one wanted to hear what you had to say anyway, right? But we all have that inner dialogue that ends up actually being the loudest troll that we ever have, right? And you have to like punch it in the face and say, screw it, I'm gonna do it anyway. A negative comment gives you the opportunity to explore why this is a negative comment for you and why it made you feel a certain way, and what does it actually mean about reality? Because a lot of times it doesn't really mean anything about your reality, it's entirely the commenter's reality. And here's why I recommend not deleting your negative comments. I have a little bit of a filter for this. I do delete some and I'll explain which ones I delete in a minute. But here's why I don't think it's a good idea to delete comments, even if they're negative, even if they're nasty. It's because engagement is good for the algorithm. It's a green flag. Engagement makes way for more engagement, right? And so it's usually not a good idea to delete comments. Now, I will delete a comment if it's genuinely offensive, like to other people. If it's if it's offensive to me, it's like, okay, whatever, it's fine, whatever. Deep breath, we can deal with it, right? I can respond back, thank you for your feedback, or I can snap back, clap back if I want to. Um, if I see the comment before I have coffee in the morning, sometimes it's known to happen. If it's a comment that I think might be offensive to other people, like in my audience, if if I would feel embarrassed to have these words like on my channel for somebody else to see and be like possibly offended by, those get deleted, those get blocked. And to be honest with you, that doesn't really happen very often. But YouTube does have a word filter, a comment filter. You can check this in your YouTube settings. There's a comment filter to filter out like offensive language, um, like cursing, uh, comments out links and things like that. And you can change how how filtered you want them to be. And it's completely up to you what constitutes something that like deserves to be deleted, or stick around and respond to it. Thank you for your feedback. Now, here's what most people never consider when it comes to a critical comment or a negative comment or or feedback that doesn't feel good. Your audience is watching how you respond. So the negative comment gives you the opportunity to respond in a way that actually helps your brand, that helps your no like and trust, that helps people get to know who you really are as a human being beyond just how you're showing up on camera. Because they can see the comment and they can also see your response, they can see the whole conversation take place. So shutting it down with thank you for your feedback is one way to do it. Acknowledges that you saw the comment, the comment is there, not deleting it, gonna let it sit here. Thank you for your feedback. Calm, cool, collected. That's me. That's that's me on the outside. Depending on the comment, it might not be me on the inside, as we've already established with the army of red ants. But if you engage the person in a conversation, again, like depending on the comment, the way that I see it is you're not responding to the person who left the comment. You're responding to your audience. And it's so easy to go, oh, this negative comment, I gotta get rid of this. This person's like trying to invalidate what I what I just said, I gotta get rid of this comment because I don't want my audience to see that, because that's gonna make me look bad. When in reality, responding back in a smart way, a diplomatic way, a um like a re-education way is one of the best things that you can do because once somebody sees the negative comment and they might go, yeah, oh, good point, then they're gonna see your response to it, where you then invalidate the point that they just made. Earlier today, I got some critical comments on a threads post, which is which is actually just so beautiful and serendipitous of the universe to provide me with this opportunity uh to talk about this very thing in this very video on the very day that I was recording it. I don't usually get a lot of negative comments. I don't usually get a lot of like criticism because I'm not a very polarizing person, I'm not a very trauma person. Um, today was a little different. A couple people didn't like what I said, and I contemplated deleting the first this like critical comment that I got, and I decided, no, actually, I think I have more to say on this. I have more to add to the conversation, and I asked myself if my audience sees this, when my audience sees this, if a client or a customer or a future client or customer were to see this post and that comment, what would I want them to see, or what would I want them to know about this point that this person is bringing up? They did say that I was giving AI advice, which is not true, but other than that, they did bring up an interesting, uh, like an interesting point, I guess you could say. So I responded to it, they responded back. It wasn't about trying to change that person's mind or like shift their opinion or anything like that. It had nothing to do with the person that was leaving the comment. It had to do with how do I want other people to see me responding to this? And so I responded, they responded back, and I came in with the old thank you for your feedback, period. Now you can come up with your own, you know, go-to signature feedback phrase. You can use thank you for your feedback. I think it is very neutral, it's very diplomatic, and it's very like I have the last word, thank you for your feedback. End of discussion. And if this video was helpful for you, make sure you hit the thumbs up and follow me here on YouTube because this is where I share my YouTube strategies for not only growing your audience, but also using YouTube to grow your business, to bring in your clients and customers. I'm not here to teach you how to like be a big YouTuber. I'm not here to make you go viral or anything like that. I'm here to help you show up as you on camera and be visible with what you have to share with the world. YouTube is the most powerful platform to do that. YouTube also comes with trolls and people with negative opinions and people who will so freely share their feedback with you, and all you have to do is say, thank you for your feedback.