How to respond to a negative review
I'll try and keep it brief.
We have a small brick and mortar store and outside we have plants and a bench.
It gets a lot of people coming just to take photos, which is fine. But we've have a lot of issues with it (people eating and leaving trash, people breaking seasonal decorations around it, people breaking the plants, etc). And so we've become quite sensitive to people sitting there long periods of time.
Today a woman was sat there and had her feet up on our small wooden sign we have outside. I asked her to please not put her feet on our sign, and she did. But then my partner decided to ask her to move on as she'd been there a while already, saying that the seat is usually only for our customers.
Well this woman has posted online saying she previously bought something at our store, and was angry/upset about today's encounter.
I originally didn't want to respond, thinking that the public tends to support the individual rather than the faceless brand. But it's a small world, and I'm worried that no response is bad if not worse.
What do we do? Response by replying publicly? Message her privately? Ignore it?
EDIT:
So before we could respond, the social media post has gotten worse. A few people are siding with this woman and just being mean.
She came back today with a face mask on trying to hide and took another photo of our shop so god knows what she's going to do now.
We had someone let their dog pee on our shop so we asked them not to, and that person has also commented saying we told her off (we didn't. just asked her not to let her dog do that on our shop when there's a patch of grass opposite us).
A couple of people in the comments have taken our side, but we don't want to get caught up in all this.
We've decided to just ignore it. She posted at about 10pm at night, and by 9am the next morning she's decided to go on a crusade to take us down. I'm pretty sure there's nothing we could do or say to calm her down. She doesn't want an apology, she just wants to attack us.