Over 3 billion users have been using social media every day to communicate with one another, share what’s happening in their lives, discover different events, and, well, to shop online. Social media platforms are considered a huge online marketplace where users are free to share their views, experiences, and feedback about the brand they are considering to buy.
Today, businesses are taking advantage of these social media platforms to communicate with modern-day audiences. Since these platforms are widely accessible for business promotion and commercial activities, several companies establish their presence on social media sites as customer support and digital marketing.
However, given the nature of the Internet, taking your marketing pursuits to social media sites can be a double-edged sword. The content you create can either take your business to the next level or cause its downfall. For that reason, social media moderators need to make sure that the brand image of companies is clean and represents a positive image.
With users having the freedom to post content of their choice, social media channels have become a favorite breeding ground for fraudulent, abusive, and disturbing content. Companies have embraced social media moderation to avoid misuse of these platforms and filter irrelevant and offensive content on their pages.
Now is a very timely opportunity to dive deeper into social media moderation, understand its significance, and learn about the tools that assist you to moderate user-generated content viably and efficiently.
What Is Social Media Moderation?
Social media moderation is the method of managing and regulating the user activities done or carried out on social media platforms, pages, or communities. It covers all types of user-generated content across different social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. It typically follows a fixed set of guidelines and policies that users and followers must abide by for as long as they use the platform’s services, follow a specific page, or join an online community.
While policing and segregating inappropriate content from those that are acceptable is moderation’s main gist, there is so much more to what it can do for businesses and brands. A moderator’s role in community solutions incorporates caring for both content and individuals remotely and supporting the community strategy and objectives internally.
Significance of Social Media Moderation to Your Brand’s Success
Moderation may sound like a luxury, but the truth is you need it more than you think to protect your brand identity and image. When your company gets associated with content that is generated and posted without your explicit control, you are exposing your brand to a certain level of risk.
The comments and feedback given by your online followers play a vital role in building brand reputation. That is why it is very important to address the critical role of social media moderation to manage the quality of the content while keeping your brand’s integrity intact.
Let’s check out the top reasons why moderation is crucial for your business.
- Customers depend on social media for information
According to a study, 70% of customers have gone by social media sites to get information. Based on this statistic alone, your brand must guarantee it uses social media aptly to cater to its entire audience. This can be done by sharing relevant and verified information about your services and looking out for deceptive details shared by scammers, such as wrong referral codes on user comments or phishing content.
People will inevitably return to your brand’s social accounts’ comments area to see what users are saying about your brand. It’s imperative to moderate what is being said within your digital social setting. Public feedback weighs heavily on the customer’s perception and level of trust in your company. Erroneous or misleading data provided by trolls on your page distorts your credibility. Brands should monitor and respond to all queries that may be possibly sensitive and harmful to their business.
- Enhanced Online Presence
Businesses are taking advantage of social media platforms to attract potential customers and check out their competitors. They use these platforms to promote their products and engage potential buyers or clients. In return, social media users have the freedom to express their views and feedback, which can either be positive or negative and does not meet the community guidelines. This is where social media moderation comes in. They help in reducing hostile, befoul, and derisive comments, thus making the platform secure for everybody. In the long run, it helps brands in upgrading their online presence.
- Restrict Spam
Of the billions of social media users, there are deceitful ones in the mix whose life mission is to spread inappropriate content across these platforms and offend specific groups or communities. There are also fraudulent social media pages that fabricate facts and fake news for the sake of gaining traffic to their website or page.
Social media moderation plays a crucial part in removing these comments and making the platform secure for both brands and their followers. It keeps spam content under control to enhance user experience for the people who visit your page.
- Identify Legitimate Users
Some users may pose a serious threat to the safety of businesses’ reputations. Since some aggressors mimic legitimate user activity by uploading inappropriate content, it is challenging for several companies to maintain their positive image. This is because of some content that goes virtually which is undetected by guidelines and human reviews.
But, with the help of social media moderation, businesses can now get insights into the behavior of their customers. Social media moderation meets dangers with a massively scalable detection engine that correlates behavior across accounts, instead of merely viewing accounts in isolation. With an appropriate approach and considerable background on social media moderation, businesses can eliminate fake reviews, fake profiles, and hostile comments. It becomes easier and faster to terminate fraudulent attacks that come from new account registrations, and incapacitate identity thieves before they can cause damage.
- Protect Brand Image
Social media is the main communication channel that companies use to engage with customers. As such, moderators also serve as mediators between businesses and their audience. They screen UGCs and help to reduce the risks of inappropriate and toxic content from clouding people’s judgment of a brand’s credibility and prevent any miscommunication from emerging.
By filtering comments on companies’ platforms and overseeing harmful data linked with their brands across the internet, moderators can verify the authenticity of what people post and share across business pages.
- Increased Website Traffic
Brands can successfully increase their website traffic through social media platforms.
The comment section in a company’s social media page allows users to leave their reviews about the brand you are promoting. A well-regulated comment section enhances business-to-customer interaction and becomes instrumental in helping achieve your social media marketing goals.
As more people follow a business page, there will also be larger volumes of UGCs to check. Hence, stronger vigilance and consistency in monitoring followers’ feedback essentially drives more people to check out what a business can offer.
The good thing about social media moderators is while they offer a toxic-free environment they can also organize the comments posted according to time, have comments with the most engagement be moved at the top, and hide irrelevant comments (typically those with tags to other social media accounts or profiles).
- Audience Engagement
Audience engagement is the most extremely vital portion of every brand that needs more profit and website traffic. Companies build social media and Google Ads campaigns so that they can draw in potential clients and engage them with their products and services. With social media moderation, a brand can filter fraudulent content that can potentially ruin the brand. Content moderation is fundamental for companies to engage customers and keep them secure while browsing their products and learning about their services.
- Improved Sales
Social media platforms have the most noteworthy purchasing power. User-generated content is something that each brand depends on because most customers believe in user reviews and feedback regarding the effectiveness of a product or service. It helps businesses to get customer reviews and feedback so that they can execute powerful content to enhance customer satisfaction. Moderating inappropriate content from your website and platforms maintains your brand’s good reputation and lead to improved sales.
Best Practices of Social Media Moderation To Protect Your Brand
Social media allows you to promote your brand and engage with customers worldwide. While it is a great way to interact with a wider audience, you cannot deny the fact that these audiences could also damage your brand reputation. A single comment, feedback, or review can either boost or damage your brand. Here are some best practices for moderating your social media platforms to protect your brand.
Set clear community guidelines
In order for your users to create quality content, you need to set clear rules and guidelines in place. Be clear about the type of content, language, and behavior that are acceptable within your page or community. You should discuss firsthand the consequences if they break the rules. Do not just focus on what sanctions will be applied to the users, but rather take the time to assess how their actions and posts may influence the entire community. Make sure that the rules are posted so users can effectively see them, so they’ll know precisely what to do before they comment or upload content.
Activate AI Moderation
Automated moderation operates without constant supervision of human moderators. It can help you to eliminate unacceptable comments automatically, faster, and scale it more carefully. This will benefit companies that do not operate 24/7. Attackers work any time of the day, so it is very important to have an automated moderation to block their content even without a human moderator present all the time.
Additionally, AI moderation software is programmable to determine the content that does not follow rules set by community guidelines. This includes abusive and harmful content that takes on numerous shapes and forms. It screens images, video content, texts embedded within images, and tricks used by some followers and community members when attempting to bypass profanity filters.
Get Rid of Comment Spam Immediately
You cannot stop someone from harassing your company on social media. Social media moderators act as a protective barrier for your brand and followers by blocking individuals who spread lies, promote aggression, or make baseless claims about your brands.
Users can quickly tarnish your brand’s reputation if left unchecked since they have the freedom to scroll through your comment threads. Having a social media moderator on standby will assist your company to block certain keywords and only approve comments that are favorable to your online image and audience’s preferences before they appear on your page. In extreme cases, they’ll give the option of closing the comments section if needed or removing someone from your follower’s list.
Don’t let spammers, cybercriminals, or trolls damage your brand identity. Get rid of them immediately.
Designate a community manager
Community managers and moderators are both responsible for making social media communities safe from online attackers. Their objective is to guarantee that the community thrives with valuable contributions, appropriate user behavior, and high levels of engagement among group members. Trolls and spammers abound in many online communities, and that is why moderators and community managers need to work together to look at mainstream social media to ensure that comments, reviews, and contents are safe and adheres to the group’s specific guidelines. Community managers should be tough and prepared for the worst with the best intentions while thinking about the welfare of customers.
Outsource Social Media Moderation Services
Businesses simply don’t have the time to diligently go through every content, comment, feedback, and review across multiple channels to identify harmful UGC from those that are not. Since moderation is time-consuming, it would be better to hire a third-party agency to do the job for you. Several companies offer moderation services that have expert social media moderators who are knowledgeable at customizing and adjusting the community guidelines according to your needs while eliminating inappropriate content.
They are in-charge of filtering offensive posts, hate speech, pornographic imagery, spam, and other sensitive content. Among the different types of moderation services available for outsourcing include text or comment moderation, image moderation, and video moderation. Outsourcing saves you hours upon hours of checking UGC, and enables you to identify the most pressing issues of your customers and address them pronto.
Conclusion
Maintaining a positive brand image through social media is extremely time-consuming and tiring. Social media may be the best way to promote your brand, engage with customers, and boost sales, but the bottom line is that you need to protect your brand identity and your audience. If you wish to succeed in the business industry, implementing content moderation services is key.
If you execute social media moderation, it will keep your customers satisfied, your brand image secure, and corporate communications clean. Now that you’ve learned the significance of moderation in building and maintaining your online social profile, you can utilize it better to attract the right crowd to your business page. Hence, having reliable content moderation services will help you in driving more customers when you are running a marketing campaign on your social media sites.
Moderation is imperative, so don’t let fraudulent content damage your business.
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