"Your Gym Sucks": How to Deal With Comments on Facebook Ads

Mike (00:02):

Oh, this is a great comment. “Love your vibe. Another good one. “This gym is fire.” I agree. Oh, another good one. “I can’t wait to get her done at your gym.” Ah, this is. Wait a second. “Hey loser. Your gym sucks. You suck. This ad sucks and your program sucks. I hate you and hate your logo.” Mateo, you see this comment on my ad? This is open hostility.

Mateo (00:26):

That’s pretty brutal there.

Mike (00:29):

I’m going to respond. I think I’m just gonna do something super defensive and obscenely passive aggressive. What do you think? Just go with it?

Mateo (00:37):

Well, as satisfying as that may be, I don’t know that that is the best course of action.

Mike (00:45):

All right, I’ll just delete this jerk store comment I was going to write. OK. All right. OK. Let’s talk about it. I don’t know what I’m doing. In this edition of Two-Brain Radio, we’ll go over dealing with comments left on Facebook ads. Should you delete them? Should you respond? What should you do? We’ll be back with marketing expert, Mateo Lopez right after this. Want to add $5,000 in monthly revenue to your gym? You can. If you want to know how, you can talk to a certified Two-Brain Business mentor for free. Book a call at twobrainbusiness.com today. And we are back.

Mike (01:17):

I am still bummed about this brutally hostile comment on my ads. So we’re going to talk about how to deal with it. Mateo, you’ve run a lot of ads. Have you seen some just vicious trolls coming out from under the bridge to rip into your ads?

Mateo (01:30):

I actually haven’t seen anything too vicious, but I have definitely seen like—personally, but with clients in other parts of the world and parts of the country, I’ve definitely seen my fair share of some weird comments.

Mike (01:45):

What kind of stuff have you seen? Was it as bad as the one that I just got?

Mateo (01:50):

Sometimes, you know, thinking this is like some kind of scam or I’ve seen someone just like hate on the image, especially if I use one of the stock images. I’ve definitely seen people just like hate on like, I hate this branding. I hate this image. I hate this like headline. Like this is so slimy or whatever. Like I’ve seen that before. Some people just like don’t like the—like you’re saying attention Hoboken locals. You ready to get fit? Like some people just hate that.

Mike (02:27):

What’s there to hate there? I don’t get it.

Mateo (02:31):

I don’t either. But you know—.

Mike (02:34):

Trolls gotta troll.

Mateo (02:35):

People online are strange these days. People are very strange these days.

Mike (02:39):

Yeah, I’ve seen some nasty ones. Again, personally, I haven’t had a whole lot of bad ones on stuff that I’ve done, but I haven’t done a ton of advertising. I have seen some other ones, and sometimes on Two-Brain Business we’ll get some people coming out and grinding axes and so forth. And then you’ll often see just on, you know, just on Facebook pages, you’ll see sometimes people roll in, not even on ads, just rolling in and dropping, you know, nasty stuff all over the place. So we’ll ask you this question. When you get cranky people on your ads and they leave comments, should you engage them? What do you think?

Mateo (03:12):

Honestly, I think it’s dealer’s choice on that one. The one I’ll see the most, what’s the price, what’s the price? What’s the price?

Mike (03:19):

Let’s get to that one in a bit.

Mateo (03:21):

And so if it’s something like that where it’s not openly hostile, you know, it’s just a question. If it’s a question, yeah, go ahead and try and do your best to answer it. You know that that’s an opportunity for you to start a dialogue with someone. So yeah, if it’s a question, feel free to start engaging and getting them to either start a DM with you or to book an intro with you, direct them to your scheduling link.

Mike (03:48):

I’ll ask you a quick question right about that. So would it be better to respond to that question in the thread and try and share with the world or would you recommend that people kind of, you know, hit like and go to DM? What’s better?

Mateo (04:01):

Yeah, it kind of depends on the question. If it’s something that you think people would benefit from knowing the answer to, like, this program is for everyone. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be in shape to start, click here to book your intro. That’s something that you can post publicly in response to someone asking you, Hey, this looks intimidating, a little scary. Or, Hey, should we do it? I’m scared. I’m nervous. Yeah. So that’s obviously a response that wouldn’t hurt for everyone to see. But yeah, something on pricing, that’s something like, yep, our programs are, you know, tailor-made for every person. They’re fully customizable, the best way to understand what’s gonna be the right package for you or right fit for you or right program for you, let’s take this offline. You know what I mean? But then in terms of the negative ones, you know, I’ve never really found a way in which you can turn that one around into your favor. I’d rather just not engage. Do not engage, do not engage.

Mike (05:01):

Yeah, it generally, and I’ve dealt with this more with nasty comments on blogs or things like that or articles that I’ve published in this or other jobs. There is rarely a way to engage people on the internet that doesn’t devolve into some sort of like, you know, mudslinging or passive aggressive or you know, whatever it is, it’s usually a bad deal. But at times there is a place for that. And I have waded into a few discussions and just said, like, you know, that is flat-out wrong when a guy has, you know, stepped out of line and is doing disservice to the readers. But in general, and that’s in an editorial context, in an advertising context, it’s even more different because you’re not looking to spark the best debate in the history of the internet in your ad, right?

Mateo (05:40):

Yeah, exactly. No, you’re not. You want people to take an action. Anything else is a distraction from that action. For some of the articles this happened last week in the CrossFit affiliate owners group, someone put this article about snatches or some post about snatches and it just fueled this a hundred-comment-long debate, which was the point. I think the point was to generate some engagement around this company’s, you know, brand or whatever. They were trying to get people to talk about this issue or whatever. But yeah, the place for that is not on your ad, not on your direct response ad.

Mike (06:17):

Along those lines, did you happen to see the Morning Chalk-Up the other week where there was that keto post? It was an op ed.

Mateo (06:26):

No, I did not.

Mateo (06:26):

Oh man, it got lit, my wife was telling me about it and I guess they put something up as an opinion editorial piece and the comments were savage and there were like some decent players in there, like a Layne Norton showed up and Patrick Vellner was in there and there was a bunch of people and it got heated to the point where they, I think they shut the comments down for a period just to cool people off.

Mateo (06:44):

What was the headline?

Mike (06:46):

I don’t remember, but I think someone was saying that the keto diet, you need to do it if you’re doing CrossFit. And there were people saying that this is irresponsible advice and all this other stuff. And again, I haven’t read the article so I can’t comment on it, but I know that there was a massive debate and again, on an opinion editorial piece, that’s where debate works and this one got out of control.

Mateo (07:05):

I think that was 100% on purpose. If I were to guess, that is 100%, that was very much probably, you know, they knew, I would be willing to bet they knew that saying something like that was going to be divisive and cause some outrage. And that’s the point with something like that. I mean, that’s how people sell newspapers. That’s exactly, you’re selling outrage one side or the other, or it’s keto is bad. Change my mind. You know, like that’s entirely the point of saying something like that.

Mike (07:41):

I wrote an op ed calling for about five years in a print paper a long time ago, and you literally some days will just pick an issue and take a side and write. And you’re trying to stir things up, but exactly what you said, getting that going in your ad when all you want people to do is click through and give you their contact info and book an appointment, getting people scrolling through these horrible comments and trolls is not going to do anything. So that is your first lesson here from this podcast is don’t start an angry debate in the comments of your ads.

Mateo (08:08):

1000%.

Mike (08:08):

Let’s move on to the one the one you spoke about before, cause this is the huge one. And I had this happen on an ad that I put up. It’s the price stuff. We were offering a program, a six-week challenge, but the idea is that it’s customized to you. All our stuff said it’s customized to you. We find out all about you and it’s the stuff that you’ve written, Mateo, and we’re just trying to figure out what you need. We’re going to assign a challenge to you. And I got price, price, price, price, price questions and they spiraled. And as soon as there was like five or six, I think it turned into like 30 or 40. And all of a sudden that’s all anyone wanted to know. No clicking, no appointments booked, nothing. Have you seen that before? Yeah. So what do you do? What’s the way out of that?

Mateo (08:54):

So, you could go line by line and reply to each one and basically give your same canned to answer, which is this program has different levels depending on your needs. The best way to find out which program is going to be the right fit for you, book your No-Sweat Intro to find out, or you know, something along those lines, right? You could ahead and do that. Now there’s another option. And this might also help when you’re dealing with nasty comments and things like that. You can set up, at least at the time of this, recording, you can, I don’t know, people are gonna listen to this 10 years from now, this will still be the case. You can set up some moderation, I guess settings for your pages and that carries over into your ads.

Mateo (09:56):

So if you go into your business’ Facebook page, your business page in Facebook, you can actually go into settings and then you can scroll down. There’s something called page moderation. And then from there you can actually select words or phrases that you want to block. So that comments that contain these words, if someone replies to your page posts, for example, and they comment, if their comment contains one of these words, that comment will be blocked or need to be reviewed by you, right? So then you can put in words like price or scam, or this is bullshit.

Mike (10:39):

Or even designer sunglasses or Viagra or all the other stuff that shows up on my blog.

Mateo (10:45):

Exactly. There’s also a profanity filter as well. That’s a separate setting, but it’s right underneath where it says page moderation. So this will apply if someone comments on a post or makes a comment on your business page. But if you have these filters set up and you’re running ads on behalf of your business’ Facebook page, which in most cases, if you’re running ads, most of you out there are doing, those features will carry over. So if someone makes a comment, and they say one of your trigger words, there’ll be a blocked.

Mike (11:18):

And so you said they’re held for moderation. Like can you decide to let them go or how does that work?

Mateo (11:26):

I know they’re blocked. I have to see if you can actually moderate them, I know that they get blocked. I think you still get a notification. But I have to fact check that, don’t do a fake news on me, I have to fact check it. But I’m pretty confident you get a notification that Hey, someone commented on your ad, but I gotta double check that for you.

Mike (11:52):

So when you, and you can do this, like you can go through it without that filter. You can still go in and you can hide comments, correct?

Mateo (11:57):

Yeah, you could still go in one by one and do it. But if you don’t want anyone mentioning the word price or you know free, asking if it’s free, for example, you can block those two words and then that way no one will ever see those comments or think to ask it themselves, hopefully. Or maybe they will, but then they’ll get blocked.

Mike (12:21):

We will circle back in just a minute. First, this podcast is all about actionable steps and we always want to give you stuff to do. That is the Two-Brain Business way. Chris Cooper has created the new Growth ToolKit to wealth. It is an incredible app and it will literally tell you step by step how to create an amazing business. The best part, it is all based on data, the things the top gyms in the world are doing. There’s no guesswork. Just action and results. For more info about how a certified mentor can help you improve your business, visit twobrainbusiness.com to book a free call. Now, more actionable marketing stuff. So we’re talking about comments. And my question for you here is are there any issues, does Facebook look down upon thy ad if you block or delete or hide comments, what happens?

Mateo (13:07):

Yeah, I think that, you know, most of the business owners that we work with, they’re running ad campaigns and their spend is relatively small compared to the big players in the space. So, you know, I don’t think you’re generating enough traffic where you’re going to see a huge impact here. But yes, you know, Facebook wants to prioritize content, whether it’s a post or a paid post or ad. They want to prioritize the content that’s engaging, that people are looking at and sharing and following and commenting on. And so one of the metrics they use to judge engagement is comments, right? So if your ads aren’t receiving any comments whatsoever, they might rank a little lower. They might get a lower relevancy score. They might not get shown to the people in your audience as much as they would if the content was proved to be engaging by the Facebook gods.

Mateo (14:07):

So there is a little bit of a downside there. However, you know, I think you just have to weigh out the pros and cons. I think it’s beneficial to not have a bunch of bad comments cause that’s the flip side, right? You allow all the comments. Yeah, Facebook’s gonna see that people are engaging with your ad, but it’s in a negative way, right? If it’s a bunch of like a price or scammy or troll comments. So there’s a give and take.

Mike (14:35):

Yeah. The strategy that I use was exactly that where when I noticed that a number of price comments were triggering just a whole bunch more, I hid them and I messaged each of the people back directly and just gave them the pitch. And then I just put up a comment myself, just saying, here are answers to some common questions that people are answering. Or asking, pardon me. And I put up, you know, the same pitch that I was sending people by DM and that seemed to take care of a lot of it. And then what I was getting after that was legitimate comments about like, you know, when can I start or you know, do you still have spaces left or you know, I love that picture, whatever it was and that stuff, then I would obviously respond and that seemed to do the trick where I got rid of the nasty stuff and I was still generating some engagement.

Mateo (15:19):

Oh, now I’m learning from you, Mike, that’s a pretty good tip there. That’s a hot take there.

Mike (15:21):

Ah, I took all this, this all comes from your program, the Two-Brain Marketing stuff. And it was your ad copy as well. So that’s the stuff that was working, but I did get people, you know, once you see the price crew comes in and I’ll tell you this, I don’t think even one single time that I have messaged someone on price and I’ve tried like 10 or 12 or 15 different like schticks, not one has ever booked an appointment.

Mateo (15:47):

Oh yeah, no, I can speak anecdotally. I think that’s probably pretty true for me too. Yeah. If someone’s opening with that line, they’re probably not going to be—

Mike (16:03):

I tried, you know, it’s a premium service and it’s a 12 or $1,500 package. I’ve tried, we have things to suit all budgets. I’ve tried like our lowest offering, which is, you know, I think it’s about a hundred bucks up to, you know, it ranges from here to here. Literally nothing works. And the question that I ask is like, what do they actually want to hear? And I think what they want to hear is free.

Mateo (16:25):

Yeah. Yeah. Or if someone had a set price in mind that they knew they wanted to spend, then you just miraculously guess that.

Mike (16:35):

27.61.

Mateo (16:35):

Exactly. Exactly. What you just said though, putting your comment as the top comment and in that comment a little mini FAQ there, I think that’s awesome.

Mike (16:52):

It seemed to help and that’s certainly, it’s like when I did that, it stopped the string of price comments and we started getting more appointments. So it seemed to work in this instance. And if you guys try it out and it works, leave us a comment and let us know. And I saw this in our private, marketing group, a question about, asking about comments popping up and so forth. And so I’ll ask this to you and you can answer it publicly. If you get a bunch of comments on an ad, should you try running, you know, copying that ad, running it again without the comments to see if it does better?

Mateo (17:29):

Yeah. 100%. You can just shut her down and try it again. And once you relaunch it, as long as you’re not, depending on the way you duplicate it, you can launch that ad on clean slate. So you definitely try that out for sure. You know, the way Facebook, it changes, but at one point, Facebook, the way they kind of presented your ad was, you know, you have your audience of a hundred people. It would, let’s just say for this example, it’s going to show it to that, you know, that, 20 in the corner over here and they’re going to laser focus in on that group. So if you were to restart it might choose a different pocket of that hundred, a different 20 or whatever it is, to show your ad to, so you might have better results showing it to a different cohort in your big audience if you have a large audience. So that could definitely work.

Mike (18:36):

So it’d be something to try, but again, it’s not foolproof, but if you’re out there and you figure that like the comments on my ad are the thing that’s preventing my ad from succeeding, you might just consider duplicating that thing and starting fresh.

Mateo (18:51):

Yeah. I mean, I rarely look at them. I rarely look at the comments. So, I don’t think that would be the make or break. Unless the first one was like, anyone who sees this do not click on it. It’s a scam. You might have to deal with that comment. But besides that, yeah, I wouldn’t stress out too much. Focus on your offer, focus on your copy, your image, focus on your lead nurture. Don’t stress about the comments.

Mike (19:26):

Haters gonna hate, trolls gonna troll. The last one I’ll ask is something we kind of talked about already, you said that engagement on an ad or any Facebook thing is a good thing. Does Facebook like it when you respond and interact with these people or do they just care that you got a comment from an organic person?

Mateo (19:45):

I don’t have a definitive answer for that, but yeah, if there’s a back and forth going on, I think that, yeah, if there’s some, any kind of engagement’s going to be going to be good. Having said that, if no one’s commenting and all the comments are just from you, I don’t think that’s good.

Mike (20:05):

It’s just talking to yourself and no one’s listening,

Mateo (20:08):

I don’t think that’s going to help. That being said, if you can generate replies right from people and they’re generally positive, right? That’s a good thing, right? If you’re getting the conversation going, people coming back for more, you’re gonna rank a little bit higher.

Mike (20:24):

And it still is a way to potentially, I mean, what we’re trying to do is start conversations. So if you can potentially start a conversation in a comment, continue in a DM and then finish it off in a sales meeting at your business, maybe that’s a win. So, the first thing that will tell you is do not, you know, fight the trolls. It is not the time to pull out your battle ax and slay a troll in the comment section of your ad. Do not do that. But comments are a good thing in general, unless they’re bad and if they are a bad thing, you can start looking at hiding. And you can also start using some of the filters that Facebook offers, with the caution on that is that if you hide every single comment on there, you’re killing your engagement. And Facebook may not be totally thrilled with that. So go case by case. Pretty accurate summary of what you advice you’ve got?

Mateo (21:12):

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Mike.

Mike (21:12):

There you go. Thank you for listening. I’m Mike Warkentin with Mateo Lopez and this is Two-Brain Radio. Please remember to subscribe for more great shows. If you’re a gym owner and need some help growing your business, Two-Brain mentors can show you the exact steps to add $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Book a free cal on TwoBrainbusiness.com to find out more. Thanks for listening guys.

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