A creator posts the video you commissioned. Within an hour there are forty comments, and three of them are about your delivery times.
You cannot moderate them, you did not see them first, and the person who can act is not on your team. That is the structural fact of this format: you bought the content, and the room it lives in belongs to somebody else.
Decide who answers before it goes out
This is a two line conversation at briefing and an expensive silence afterwards.
Agree that the creator answers anything about their own experience, and that you answer anything factual about the product, the order or the price. Then give them one sentence for the case they cannot handle: something like the brand can help with that, send them a message. Nothing more elaborate survives contact with a real thread.
If you want the creator to do more than that, it is work and it is paid. Asking somebody to spend an evening defending your delivery times as a favour is how a good relationship quietly ends.
The reply changes with the type
Treating every comment the same is what makes brands look defensive.
| What the comment is about | Who should answer | What the answer does |
|---|---|---|
| The product not working | The brand | Offers to fix it, in public, once |
| Price being too high | Nobody, usually | Answering signals the price is negotiable |
| The creator being paid | The creator | Says yes plainly, without apology |
| A factual error in the video | The brand, quickly | Corrects it and thanks the person |
The second row surprises people. A public argument about whether something is worth the money never ends with the commenter agreeing, and it tells every other reader that the number is up for discussion.
The fourth row is the one worth acting on fast. If the video says something inaccurate, the correction belongs in the thread and in the file: fix the video too, because the comment scrolls away and the video does not.
What not to ask the creator to do
Three things, all common and all corrosive.
Deleting the criticism
Do not ask them to delete critical comments on their own account. It is their space, deletion is visible to the person deleted, and it converts one unhappy customer into a story.
Fighting on your behalf
Do not ask them to argue with someone. A creator who becomes combative on your behalf loses the ordinary tone that made the video work in the first place.
Hiding that it was paid
Do not ask them to pretend they were not paid. Beyond the obvious problem with that, audiences read it instantly, and the disclosure was never the thing costing you conversions.
The Portuguese part
The audience for a Portuguese creator is small enough that the same people appear repeatedly, and a brand that handles one thread badly is recognisable to the same commenters six months later.
That cuts both ways, usefully. A brand that answers a genuine complaint properly, in public, in Portuguese, buys more trust from that single exchange than from the video itself. It is the cheapest reputational work available to you, and it happens in a place most brands are not even watching.
Keep reading
- When Not to Buy UGC
- The same serum, two shoppers, one campaign that works
- You Already Paid for Them to Learn the Product
- The number that matters is not the amount
- The complete UGC guide for Portugal
Frequently asked questions
Should we reply from the brand account under a creator video?
Yes, when the comment is factual and about you. Introduce yourselves plainly, answer the question, and do not add marketing language to a support reply.
What if the creator wants to delete their whole post?
That is their decision and it is worth respecting. Ask what happened, and keep the file you were licensed rather than the post.
A comment says something untrue about us. Now what?
Answer once with the correct information and leave it there. Repeated replies push a thread up rather than settling it, and anything beyond a factual correction is a decision for someone with a legal remit rather than for a marketing team.
Do negative comments mean the campaign failed?
Usually the opposite. Silence under a creator video is a worse signal than argument, and a thread with real questions in it is a product page doing its job.
