https://www.listennotes.com/e/8211b1289cc14c09b3288a722bafe904

If you've ever had anyone say anything even slightly unkind to you on the Internet, or you are too scared to put yourself out there because you're worried that they will, then I have got a really simple kind of fun tip for you today. And I'm going to explain exactly how to deal with them so you never have to stress about it again inside. So let's go. Hey. Hey guys, it is Kate here from hellofunnels. And welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Now today is a bit of a fun one where we talk about a bit of an unfun topic, but I want to give it a upbeat twist. So today I'm talking about trolls, or rather the less nice people on the Internet, if we want to put it nicely. I won't use their language. I'll get banned. So recently, as you might have heard, if you follow me on Instagram, if you don't, you should head over to hellofunnels. But recently I started posting a couple of posts about some of the more politically correct trolling that I'd been getting on my ads recently. And I definitely noticed a really big uptick on that this year. Previously you might get the odd comment, but this year it has gone next level and it was getting a bit annoying because there's a few reasons why you don't want trolls on your ads. Obviously, number one is it looks terrible. If somebody sees your ad and everything underneath it says, this person is a scammer, this person is a con artist, don't believe them, blah, blah. Then do you think they're going to click on your ad? No way. The other reason why it's not great is that it actually then takes up my team's time and my time going in there and going through the process to get rid of those comments. And then the third thing is I think the algorithm kind of picks up that a certain type of person is engaging with your posts and it just sees engagement as engagement. So it's like, great, let's send them more. So it almost becomes this like self propagating thing where as soon as you start to get some, it can really snowball out of control. And then let's not forget to talk about just how much it feels freaking sucks to have somebody calling you names for no good reason on the Internet. And I want to just also preface this, that those people who were commenting on them, they were 100% male, which is very strange because the particular couple of ads they latched onto, they were actually just value ads. Like they weren't click through an opt in or anything. It was just sharing some recent podcast episodes and they were actually set up to retarget. So this was only showing to people who'd visited my website. Right. And also supposedly only showing to women. So I'm like, how are these dudes? And I know it's because Advantage plus kind of, you know, with the way that Facebook's doing targeting now is it kind of. It goes outside a little bit of the initial parameters and it's like, let's just go slightly adjacent to what you just said. We. But it was very confusing at the start. I'm like, why am I getting so many angry men saying that I've ripped them off? And then, you know, I went and did some deep diving and none of these people followed me. None of them were on my email list. Definitely none of them bought any of my products or programs. They were just mad, okay? They were just, they saw and they pretty much everyone that got them angry had my face on it. So obviously this is the face of someone who annoys people. And I'm sure the comments below this will go wild with trolls agreeing with me and if it does, whatever, thanks for boosting my engagement, guys. But yeah, it was just a very interesting phenomenon. And it took me back a bit, to be honest, because I was like, I've never, like I said, I've had a couple of odd ones before. I had a weird little period where for about a month I seemed to have ended up in some weird foot fetish part of the Internet. And I was getting all these disgusting comments about my feet. So I'm never posting a shoeless picture on the Internet ever again. That was my lesson from that. But other than that, you know, I've been pretty lucky. I mean, I've been online since 2007, so it's been a bit of a miracle really. And so anyway, this was starting to get out of control. Like one morning woke up and There was like 30 comments on 1 post. And my preference, and I'll talk about like the practical side of what to do here, is that you do deal with each of these people individually to make sure they don't kind of come back. So that takes time. That's annoying. So now we sort of understand what the trolling is. Let's talk about what you can do about it. So let's talk with practical first and then we'll talk about the rest because it's just a two sided thing. So practically. First of all, if you're just getting like a Smattering, like just a couple here and there. Then really the best thing you can do is on each individual comment, you're going to want to click on the person's name, block them first, if you want a little bit of peace of mind. I actually was clicking on their name so their full details came up. And then taking a screenshot of that and saving them for a little bit just in case they came back, because I just want to see if there's any, like, repeat offenders. But you don't necessarily need to do that. Like you're just getting the odd one here or there. But you definitely want to block them first and then delete their comment, because obviously once you delete their comment, it's gone and you can't block them. So. So block, then delete. That's step number one. And again, that's only if you're finding you've got a few. If you're finding you're getting a lot and it is constant, I would definitely recommend having a look at both the types of content they're responding to. So for me, I definitely noticed pictures of this face. Clearly very annoying. And also anything where I talked about success or someone. Like, I was sharing about a client who'd done well. And obviously that is very triggering for some people. And again, that's. That's their shit, not. Not mine. But for them to see, oh, gosh, a woman talking about other women doing really well, and maybe they're not doing so well, maybe it's breaking their brain a little bit. And the only way that they can kind of feel like they can get some power back is to post pictures of dog poo. Someone did that. Disgusting. As well as dropping things like the sea bomb on a public forum. So if that's the case, if you're getting a lot of these, then like I said, you want to have a look at the types of content and then it's kind of up to you. Like, do you want to change the types of content that you're posting? Do you want to pivot it slightly if the content is working well for you? I would say no, don't let the bloody trolls win. Okay? But you just then need to maybe have a process where preferably someone on your team, not you, is jumping in and checking your ads a couple of times a day to get rid of them. The second thing you can do, and this is probably a better solution than changing the content. Although I did opt to just turn off one of the posts because it seemed to be getting like 90% of the rage. And it was just getting out of control. I'm like, it's just not worth it. It's not worth our time. And like I said, it was a retargeting value post. I'm like, it's not like our best ever performing sales posts. So, like, it can just go, it's fine. But the other thing that we started to do was actually look at the platforms where people were making the comments and responding. I found most were actually from Facebook. I've spoken to other people with the same problem and they talk about how TikTok gets an awful lot of hate as well. And then the other thing is also the types of ads. So these are retargeting ads and we'd set them up to be engagement ads because we want people to, I guess, like and comment on the value in the post. But because the algorithm doesn't seem to care if it's positive engagement or negative engagement, it seemed to think, oh, great, I'm doing a good job by getting these men to be submitting angry things. So funnily enough, to these guys who are getting so cross about, like, oh, like, someone's like, I can't believe this. Another one of these in my feed. It's like, yeah, dude, because you keep commenting on them, you idiot. So seriously, dear trolls, PSA for you. If it annoys you, don't touch it, don't look at it, don't hover over it, don't do anything, because if you engage with it, you will see more anyway off my soapbox so you can have a look. And like, are there certain placements? Are there certain channels? Are there certain. Like, is it. Facebook feed is getting most of it, then maybe do you want to look at not doing those types of ads? There's. So there are things you can do to be a bit more strategic, unfortunately. Like, they're just excluding certain types of. Like, whether it's genders or whatever. And I just will say it's not all men. I have friends who have many angry women on their feed, but I just know personally I seem to be annoying the lads. So, yeah, it's up to you. You can try and tighten up your targeting. But again, that might not be perfect. Mine was. They were literally retargeting ads, only supposed to be going to females and it was all men. So. So make of that what you will. So that's the practical side of things, like what you can do. I think the other thing that's really important to talk about is let's talk about the mental impact this has because anytime you are bullied, and actually, I totally forgot time. I was really horrendously bullied years and years ago online to the point of getting death threats. This is all started by a competitor, by the way. But anytime this happens, it takes a toll, right? Like, we are human beings, we are putting ourselves out there, we are trying to help our clients, we're trying to build businesses, we're trying to do what we love, we're trying to provide for our families. And to have people standing on the sidelines screaming at you, it can be hard. But the thing is, I just want to let you know that one, it is not your fault. It is not anything that you did. It is happening across the board to so many good people for no bloody reason. So please, as hard as it is, please try not to take it to heart. Please just look at it for what it is, in that you have triggered them in a way, in that your success, you're showing up, you're putting yourself out there, whatever it is you're doing is something that maybe they haven't been able to do or haven't been able to do well, or it's showing them it's being a mirror to them of some of the failures in their lives and they can't deal with it. They can't. They haven't been taught how to deal with their big feelings. And so they are now going and becoming jerks on the Internet. So, I mean, not that we should give them any compassion. I don't give them any compassion. I assume their mums didn't hug them much when they were younger, but that's not my problem. But I refuse to let their hate try and impact me my day, how I show up, how I run my business. So that's the first thing. I think you just need to really try and reframe it for yourself. First of all, try and remove it, then reframe it so that it's not going to impact you. Because if you let those people who've never met you, who aren't out there doing any good, big things like you are, impact you, then they win. If you just get rid of them and carry on, then they're nothing. Then they're a speck of dust. Okay, the final thing I wanted to talk about, and this is a little controversial, and feel free to take this with, again, with a grain of salt if this is something that might work for you, but I was recently at a Mastermind and we were talking about trolling, like, this is As I said, it's a common and becoming more common issue, particularly with so many crazy things going on in the world. And one of the people there at the Mastermind suggested a strategy which I thought was brilliant, which was that they've actually gamified it. They actually see any trolling comment as like a personal challenge to come up with the best retaliation, the best burn they possibly can. Now they are a bit braver than me and they leave theirs public. So. And most of those are happening on organic posts, more so than ads. So they were like as husband and wife and they're like, you know, we get together and we see someone's trolled us or said something, you know, angry or whatever, and we sit down and we come up together with what can be the best burn that we can give them back because we want them to know we don't take any shit here. And I was like, I freaking love that. It's absolutely not for everyone's brand. It's may not be for everyone's mental health. For me, I was like, this actually gives me some power back and I like it. And I'm pretty good at the old burn. So I decided to do a little bit of a hybrid model where it's kind of like, you know, that whole write the angry email and then delete it kind of strategy. It's pretty much that, but with responding to co comments. And so what I will do right before I do the block and delete is I actually write my burn back to whatever they, you know, whatever this. Like I had one guy who just said gay. Like, like what? Homosexuality is an offense? No. And so I wrote underneath it like, oh, you are like, thank you so much for trusting me with that. You know, wishing you nothing but the best. Other ones a bit less, bit less nice. But from doing that, it's actually kind of made it fun. So for me, just mentally that was quite a good strategy to then not take it so much to heart, then not be dreading opening up my ads and seeing if there's these comments on there. Because now I'm like, oh sweet, let's go, let's get them back. Now the way that I do it, as I said, is I put the comment and then I block them and delete them. So they're probably not even seeing them. I'm pretty sure they don't see them. I don't really care. It's not for them, it's for me. So that's my little fun way of playing with trolls. But yeah, I'd actually be really, really curious. Guys, if you've been listening to this and you've experienced something similar, have you found any other strategies that have been effective for you, both from practical side of things or just from a flat out mental health side of things? Or have you seen anyone else do some epic burns on their trolls? If you have DM me over @ hellofunnels if you're listening on the podcast or pop a comment below, I would really love to hear them. You might give me some inspiration. So thank you so much for joining me guys. I hope this has been helpful, I hope this has been useful, and I look forward to chatting with you again. Same time, same place next week. All righty guys. Bye.