Every business hoping to succeed online needs to unlock the power of social media. It’s no simple process to establish a robust campaign that engages audiences across multiple platforms, and brands need to put in a great deal of preparation to get the best results.
Once the foundations are set and your campaigns are live, however, the job is not done. Social media is designed to foster long-term communities of like-minded people, where conversations flow and communication goes between brands and audiences.
This unique factor gives rise to the challenge of added complexities – negative press, illegal activity, inappropriate UGC (user-generated content), and more.
Your business is responsible for handling these kinds of issues, meaning that moderation is necessary. But what is social media moderation and how will it affect your brand? Let’s dive in.
What is Social Media Moderation in Business?
Social media moderation is the process of monitoring and reviewing content surrounding your brand and managing this activity in the best way possible. While it is beneficial for users to feel free when discussing the topics important to them, the need to equally safeguard them and your brand from harmful types of content is critical.
Furthermore, your brand identity is invaluable and needs to be protected at all costs. You need to use social moderation to own the conversation surrounding your brand and provide your community with a direct line of communication.
Imagine you send a check in email to one of your customers, only to find out that they are no longer willing to do business with you because of something dodgy that came up about your brand on social media. Having no awareness of this could seriously damage your reputation.
Finally, social media moderation helps your business retain a consistent and considered approach to the unpredictable nature of social media itself. It helps keep your brand engaged with your customers and better understand their needs and wants within your industry.
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Why is Social Media Moderation Critical to Operations?
Social media moderation is an important part of your social strategy for several key reasons. Let’s explore them below.
Safeguards Your Brand and Audience From Malicious Activity
With anonymity at the heart of most digital discourse, it is all too common for individuals to feel they can say what they want or actively harm others without recourse. Unfortunately, this sort of activity leads to hate speech, racially motivated discussions, sexism, and other negative statements that harm others.
A well-thought-out social media moderation strategy combats this kind of behavior directly, creating a safer environment for everyone within your community.
Other malicious activity can include brand and content theft, which you can actively pursue and stop. Your brand is the lifeblood of your business and has to be safeguarded at all costs. Effective and proactive moderation is the best method of achieving this.
Ensures You Retain Control of Your Brand Image
If you aren’t taking part in a conversation, you cannot hope to control it. When it is your brand being talked about, positively or negatively, it can become quite risky to avoid any form of moderation.
Social media moderation helps ensure your brand image is maintained by protecting against defamatory or untrue statements, or misuse of your brand in unwanted ways. Your brand is your intellectual property and is a direct link to your success as a business. It needs to be protected. Below is an example of a brand taking control of the conversation around their activity.
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Combats Misinformation Surrounding Your Business Activity
In our digital age, misinformation is rife on all fronts. The growth of advanced artificial intelligence tools and the virality of unmoderated content on some platforms has made it increasingly simple for individuals to launch disinformation campaigns against specific targets.
Businesses are no exception and have been targeted in this very way for a range of reasons. Effective moderation enables brands to tackle the rise in misinformation and maintain healthy optics surrounding their brand.
Improves the User Experience For All
Users who feel safe and secure within your community will continue to engage, fostering conversation and growing your community organically. Unfortunately, bad actors will always exist and can cause irreparable damage to the health of your audience.
By keeping those bad actors at bay, and removing instances of racism, hate speech, transphobia, and other forms of verbal abuse, your audience will feel safe around your brand and receive a better user experience.
Ensures regulatory compliance
The laws surrounding social media platforms are constantly changing and compliance to changes in regulation is not optional. Some laws are planning to make the platform holders legally responsible for user-generated content, which creates a host of complex and difficult problems to navigate.
Robust moderation ensures you have the tools to comply with any new laws or regulations.
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Types of Social Media Moderation
Moderation is not a single approach or activity. It takes a dedicated team of community managers to handle the various aspects of effective social media moderation.
Proactive Moderation
Proactive moderation focuses on creating a series of rules and guidelines for social media communities to follow when on platforms you moderate. Community members are expected to follow these rules or face the risk of being temporarily suspended or banned from the community.
Other forms of proactive moderation include comment approval and review processes, where user submissions are reviewed and accepted (or rejected) by the moderation team before going live. Proactive moderation also includes community posts to get ahead of an issue and provide clarity directly from the brand itself.
Reactive Moderation
Reactive moderation is the process of responding to any issues that arise and dealing with them swiftly and effectively. This is the most common and one of the most directly effective forms of moderation, but it requires team members to be on-hand to facilitate it.
Automated Moderation
Automated moderation relies on using automated monitoring tools to passively watch and review activity across platforms. You can establish rules and filters that focus on unwanted phrases or terms, and automated platforms can instantly moderate posts that trigger those filters.
Generally, automated moderation works best as a tool to protect from openly hateful or abrasive language.
Democratic Moderation
Democratic moderation leverages your community as a form of moderating behavior. This is most notably seen on platforms such as Reddit, where users can upvote or downvote individual contributions – from the initial post to the comments within. The platform will automatically promote highly-praised comments to be more visible.
This can be an effective method of moderation but requires an active and engaged community to work best.
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What Can Brands Do to Effectively Moderate Social Channels?
With the benefits established, it is time to optimize your moderation process. We’ve listed some of the key elements of a well-rounded social media moderation strategy below.
Create a Social Media Policy to Create Consistency in Communications
Given that the process of moderation will fall to a team of community moderators within your social team, it is important to establish a set of clear internal policies that ensures a consistent and measured response to various forms of offending behavior.
For example, one moderator might find an offense particularly egregious, leading to a full ban of the user, while another might take a lighter approach. Subjective assessment is an unfortunate reality of human moderation, but an in-depth moderation policy can help reduce such issues and keep your team operating with the same set of boundaries.
Your social media policy should be in line with your other channel policies, which helps to unify the omnichannel and multichannel strategy for your business.
Choose When to Involve Your Brand Directly
Your brand voice is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal to engage with your community, but you run the risk of diluting its effectiveness when overused. Your moderation team can identify the severity or importance of specific issues and events that surround your business and advise when a direct statement or action is required.
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Establish a Social Moderation Team to Engage With the Community and Monitor Health
Your moderation team should be focused on managing your brand identity online and safeguarding your community from unwanted events. While this tip is an important one, it does scale in several ways – your brand’s size and content output, your community’s size, and your social media team’s size.
Realistically, an SME with limited resources simply cannot rely on human moderation as its primary tool, compared to a large international brand that will have entire departments dedicated to the role.
Use Technology to Simplify Moderation Through Automated Tools
Automation is a necessary part of moderation for small and large businesses alike. The ability to quickly and effectively moderate any extreme, hateful, or undesired content without human intervention is incredibly valuable and saves your team huge amounts of resources and time.
Furthermore, the same technology can be used to monitor trends and metrics on user behavior, which can support future sales and lead generation marketing activities.
Have a Crisis Action Plan in Place to Handle Negative Events
No matter how good your moderation processes are, there will always be problems that arise. In these times of crisis that require quick action and response from your team, it is important to have an established crisis action plan in place.
Your crisis action plan should define the protocols your social media team needs to follow when problems arise. This could include the moderation of the offending content or a community post to tackle confusion or unrest.
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Audit Content and Platforms Consistently
Communities change constantly, with new trends emerging as quickly as they disappear. While evergreen content is a boon to any business content strategy, the reality is that what worked in 2019 may not be so well received in 2024. Global events and issues will inevitably impact future discourse and need to be factored into your social media strategy.
Consistent auditing of existing content will help identify its performance and whether it is still relevant to modern standards. Where there is a threat of content losing its effectiveness or being potentially inflammatory, your audit will catch this, highlight it, and mark it for adjustment.
Promote Proactive Feedback
Offering your community paths to give direct feedback without relying on social media channels can help mitigate negative discourse growing online. The conversation comes directly to you, which you can address and manage as appropriate without the repercussions that come from public discourse.
With that said, there are times when you want to have feedback front and center. If your product is creating a buzz online, social campaigns to amplify that can be a great marketing tactic. Effective moderation lies at the heart of this process and ensures a safe and effective campaign.
Document Your Journey to Improve Future Efforts
Your processes and activities should be well documented to ensure future efforts benefit. You won’t always get moderation right as it is a delicate balancing act of promoting healthy discussion and avoiding inflammatory or damaging discussion, and communities are quick to react to feelings of heavy-handed moderation.
By keeping events and responses well documented, you will put your team in a better position to avoid future issues.
The Next Steps
Social media moderation is a necessary part of any growing brand’s online presence. The rate at which online conversations change and mutate is alarming, meaning that a moderation team to fight on the frontlines is a must in 2024.
Don’t see social media moderation as a necessary evil either, and instead, focus on the positive impact it will have on your wider community and your brand’s reception as a result.