“Why are you allowing a rapist's family to raise money to pay his legal costs?” one person wrote on the credit union's Facebook page. “Why does your business support criminals? This is being shared all over social media. We will not stand for this.”

Social media can be a great way to spread a credit union's message, but these examples highlight its uglier side: Negative comments that can damage brands, hurt membership and put employees in uncomfortable situations.

It can be hard to know how to react when social media turns vicious, but two experts who work with credit unions offer five tips to lessen the bite.

1. Watch the clock

Timely response is critical, according to BYM Agency Creative Director Jeff Birnbaum. BYM is a CUSO that does full-service marketing for about two dozen credit unions and is owned by the Overland Park, Kan.-based Mazuma Credit Union, which has $571 million in assets and 62,000 members.

Customer service complaints warrant immediate attention, he said. Other comments, such as if someone's wondering about a technological update, can justify taking a little more time.

“The key is to at least respond to them initially, within minutes — 15 minutes — so that they at least know it's being addressed,” he said. “We tell them we'll get them the answer as soon as possible and that buys us time to get the correct answer for them.”

Of course, sometimes things slip by. If, for example, a credit union discovers old comments on a review site that's unfamiliar or infrequently monitored, it may be worth handling without responding online. Adding a response could cause a buried comment to pop to the top of the thread and reignite the issue, CU Solutions Group Vice President of Corporate Marketing Paula Piccinini noted. Her firm is a CUSO that handles social media, among other things, for thousands of credit union clients and is majority-owned by the Michigan Credit Union League.

2. Take it outside

If a conversation is going negative, get it offline as quickly as possible by asking for contact information so the credit union's team can talk to the person directly, Birnbaum advised.

“We apologize about the concern and the issue,” he said. “We ask them to take it offline, off of the public threads as much as possible. That can happen by getting an email address, having them direct message us, or getting their phone number. We don't want it to blow up in a public space.”

3. Define what's over the line

“If they are using profanity, if they are vulgar, if they are offensive, discriminatory, if it's construed as bullying, harassment, intimidation, malicious, if it's an outright lie, if it's got a false profile, you have the absolute right to control what is posted on your page,” Piccinini said. “You have complete control over your page, and you are certainly within appropriate boundaries to delete anything that would be construed as offensive like that.”

Piccinini recommended adding some structure to the nuanced decision-making processes those posts create by having a social media policy and posting it on every platform a credit union uses. That gives the social media team some guidance about when it's OK to take a comment down, and it gives fair warning to users tempted to let loose.

4. Block and tackle

Simply turning on filtering tools can prevent social media nightmares.

Facebook, for example, has a setting for business pages that automatically blocks posts containing certain words or phrases most often flagged as offensive by the Facebook community, Birnbaum noted. Credit unions can add a second custom filter on top of that as well, he said, and they can still see what gets filtered out.

“If there's a valid issue that's wrapped in malicious content, then we can still address it in a more polite and political fashion by reaching out to them,” he noted.

Using admin privileges to hide comments can also be helpful, Birnbaum said.

“The person who messages you can still see it, as can their friends, but the overall public can no longer see it,” he explained. “It's a way of making it appear to the user that we're not banning them, or ignoring them necessarily, but it also doesn't incite anything that could purposely cause a lot of drama on the page that really doesn't need to be there.” That's harder to do on some platforms, such as Twitter, he said. “But you can obviously block somebody,” he noted.

5. Have the confidence to let negative comments be visible

“Social media should be an open and honest forum. If you allow for a rating system on your Facebook page or in your Yelp, or those various websites where you can give ratings, you want it to be authentic,” Piccinini said.

And to a large degree, communities often self-police, she added.

“You have to rely on the fact that people will take the time to go ahead and click on that person's profile, if you will, and check that person out,” she said. “They will come to their own conclusion about whether they have valid concerns or not. If they are posting things that are not valid, you do not need to become defensive. You really don't.”