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Your social media community manager is probably a very hardworking person. He or she may have to deal with many unique and challenging situations on a daily basis. Sometimes, in working through those challenges, they’ll make mistakes. That’s why you should make their job easier by correcting those mistakes in private.

It always bugs me to see others within an organization correcting a social media manager through either the comments section of a Facebook post, or a tweet, or any other form of public posting. Why?

• Because it undermines the social media manager: Even if they’re incorrect, there’s no need for your entire social media audience to know that!
•  Because it can confuse your social media userbase: While getting the correction out there is obviously important, your social media manager will likely need to remove the post so you could end up confusing people instead – better to tell the poster offline that they need to remove it and post a correction.
• Because it makes your organization look uncoordinated: Even if that is the case, and I note here that the social media manager made a mistake for a reason, there’s no need for your entire social media audience to know that!

It may seem like a small thing, but it’s far more effective to tell your social media manager via email, Twitter DM, phone call, or in-person visit about the mistake and they will likely thank you for it!

Now, if you’re the one who has made a mistake, here’s what I would do:

• Delete the old post
• Put in a new post with the correct information and possibly also an apology if the post was up for a long time: Make sure to reword the post so it appears like a new post.
• Follow up privately with anyone who ‘interacted’ with you on the post (retweet, comment, etc.)

Incidentally, sorry to anyone who received an early draft of this – I blame WordPress for Android. I wish you all a Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

-PG