Is posting on social media the best way to get brands to fix your customer complaint? Unfortunately, in the case of customer service issues, posting complaints to your Instagram followers isn’t the best way to get a brand to resolve an issue. You’ll get clicks and likes and maybe even comments agreeing with you that whatever you’re going through is horrible but at the end of the day, most of the people who interact with your post aren’t going to be able to do more than complain with you and once they scroll to the next post, they’ll stop even doing that.
Instead, you should contact the brand that sold you the product as soon as you notice that something is wrong with it! Hopefully that’s before you take delivery of it from the shipping carrier but it definitely should be within the first few days that you receive the product.
That’s because most brands have clauses in their product warranties that limit their liability if a product has been in your possession for more than thirty days so the sooner you let them know that there’s an issue, the better it is for you.
Sadly though, I’m seeing increasing numbers of home gym owners posting complaints about defective products on Instagram especially and when I’ve asked whether they’ve already reached out to the company, the answer is typically no.
I get the need to engage with followers by posting fresh content. But as someone who holds brands to a fairly high standard, I still think you need to give these companies, many of which are small mom and pop shops that don’t have a huge staff, a chance to fix the problem before you flame them online.
That’s why, whenever I see posts online about a defective product, I try to forward that to the company, assuming I have a contact with them, to let them know that this issue is out there in the wild and to give them a chance to address it properly. But I shouldn’t be the driving force behind fixing YOUR customer service issue!
Listen, “Content is king” is a phrase I heard multiple times in college while training to be a journalist. Another one is “All engagement is good engagement”. Those two philosophies are the driving force behind a lot of social media posts; you have to have something to post if you want to keep followers coming back to your feed and sadly people tend to respond faster to negative posts than positive ones.
But do you want clicks or do you need a solution? If you don’t care about resolving your customer care issue with a brand, you just want something to get your followers talking, then by all means, post your problems online. But if you want a positive resolution to your actual problem, then step one should be to reach out to the brand that sold you the product or provided the service. After all, if they don’t fix your issue in line with what they promise in their warranty policy, you can post about that and start the online war of your dreams.