Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms, with a global population that currently spans over 192 million users. Imagine you are a massive company with impeccable branding and a beautiful marketing scheme that the majority of the Twitterverse seems to enjoy.
However, one fateful day, an online troll decides to attack you through one of your posts. Luckily for you, you’re smart and prepared, and so you replied with a witty remark.
What happens next is a fierce battle between you and the cyber troll. The intense exchange of banter and words slowly but surely affected how your followers view you. Little by little, the reputation you created for yourself shifted from professional to petty in a matter of minutes. Your brand is ruined and your page suspended due to the unsavory words you used to destroy the wretched troll! Later that day, despite your account’s suspension, your page continued to capture the attention of the internet in the form of a laughing stock.
Meme Saga: The Fight Continues
What used to be a place for promoting your brand became a landfill of nightmares. You realized that your page turned into a meme.
It is not the kind that makes you famous in a good way. Rather, it is the kind of incident that makes people recognize your business horribly. People may say that any kind of press is good, but the reality is, having bad press attached to your branding is a blow to your credibility. It influences the level of trust you have painstakingly built with your customers.
The scenario above may seem far-fetched and uncanny at first, but it is not far from the truth. In many instances, it is inevitable for business pages to be under fire regardless of which social media platform you use. Specifically, online trolls will stop at nothing to try and get on everyone’s nerves, spammers will always be lurking around and spreading unrelated and repetitive content on your comment section, while scammers will keep on trying to extort money and personal information from unsuspecting followers.
It is scary to deal with such pervasive wrongdoers and haters on your page. But is cowering in fear the right solution to protecting your business’s digital presence?
Absolutely not!
You need to fight inappropriate content and baseless accusations directed at your brand with the tactfulness of a cheetah. You must be ruthless when it comes to false information and content that’s potentially threatening to your audience. You have to make the elimination of harmful and inappropriate content through content moderation one of your main objectives the moment you establish a page on Twitter or any other social media channel out there.
Here are some expert tips on how to moderate your page effectively and prevent your brand from becoming the joke of the century.
The Way of the Moderator: That Time We Filtered Content On Any Platform
Moderation is not easy. It has several different forms: Pre-Moderation, Post-Moderation, Reactive Moderation, Distributed Moderation, and Automated Moderation. Each of these five methods has its pros and cons, but deciding which one you want for your page will greatly affect people’s perception of your brand online; particularly in the face of possible scandalous situations.
- Pre-moderation means that content submitted by users is filtered first before it is published on the page for your followers to enjoy. The process takes time so your followers won’t be able to see posts right away.
- Post-moderation is the opposite of Pre-moderation, with the content being posted first before it gets moderated. The content here may be seen instantly or in real-time, however, audiences would be able to shield themselves from any negative content right away. The unsavory experience may damage your reputation before you can even prevent the content from spiraling out of control. Say a sexually suggestive content on a child-friendly page is left unfiltered or unmonitored for a couple of minutes upon posting. Expect several parents who viewed the said content to flag it and even report your page faster than you can post a public apology.
- Reactive moderation (RM) allows your users to flag what they think is inappropriate content. It is the kind of moderation that lifts the workload of moderation all UGC. A word of advice: Everyone has a different threshold for what is inappropriate or not so use RM with caution. In contrast, Distributed moderation, despite it being similar to RM, relies more on polls or votation to remove and rank up content that is inappropriate to the community.
- Lastly, Automated moderation is the kind of UGC filtering process that uses bots and other sophisticated tools to identify what is allowed and prohibited for content posting. The only downside to this type of moderation is the mechanism behind the filtering. User intent may not be recognized or detected by bots. In short, the first four have humans to thank for implementing moderation while artificial intelligence handles automated moderation.
All these types of moderation apply to all platforms. The most common content that is moderated on all social media platforms are images, captions, and video content. These content, whether produced by a business or their followers, capture every moment and every narrative through the most creative or artistic means imaginable. As such, you should always be mindful of what kind of content you share or envision on your page. That’s not limited to Twitter alone, but on every social media platform that you are using as well.
The One Where You Win Against Trolls
You have fought a long battle to get your reputation back and minimize the damage that the troll has done. You hired a moderator and slowly but surely, your page starts to revitalize. The negative comments and memes fade into the background as your posts begin exuding professionality and trustworthiness.
Now that you have a moderator to back up your page, the meme scandal from earlier dissipates. Everything on your page is rectified to its former glory.
This is the power of content moderators. They are the people who will prevent and fight against any form of troll, scam, or spammer that tries to infiltrate your page and create a scandal or an unsavory thread that your followers would see and use to demoralize you. Moderators improve your trust scale between you and your audience tenfold—more than what you expected. Experienced moderators make it their mission to filter all the inappropriate content that would come your way before it even gets posted.
Aside from this, moderators have the power to eradicate any trace of trolls before they even attack you, unlike being blindsided by one when you least anticipate it. You won’t have to worry about getting defamed by an inconsiderate human who hides behind a screen.
Now, we ask you, what would you like to remember when we ask what happened during that time your Twitter (or any social media platform) page turned into a viral meme?
Was it good press or bad press?
From hereon, ensure your page’s safety and privacy with the might of content moderation services.