The dominance of social media in our society today makes one mindful of the content associated with their account, business or not. Social media can influence business and personalities greatly. There is a new form of social pressure in society today where everyone is to be part of, alert of, and respond to whatever is going on in social media.
Social media today is taken as a key source of customer sentiments. And that could affect your business. Secondly, widespread news, blog posts, memes, games, images, videos, infographics, and articles over social media through the power of sharing from one person to another has led to the demise and success of many businesses. The online community is now increasingly important as far as building your business marketing and overall publicity campaign are concerned.
Nevertheless, there still is the problem of people using inappropriate, unacceptable, and dangerous content. If that kind of content is targeting a given business, the results can be disastrous if it reaches many people. Therefore companies want to be aware of what people are saying and posting about them on social media.
Oworkers Social media content moderation companies are reviewing content posted by users to determine its desirability, safety, worth, and appropriateness before or after being published or allowed to publish. It involves screening user content posted on social media pages and groups before they can spread further through the art of sharing from one user to others. For companies, this ensures that the content posted by users cannot damage the company’s reputation and publicity.
It also prevents cyber-bullying and radicalization.
It pays for companies to implement stringent measures to monitor groups and screen content in groups and pages. Especially for companies with a huge following, it is likely that arguments and disagreement will ensue from time to time in the groups. Although it is OK to allow for healthy discussions to ensure, heated arguments can be damaging to a company reputation.
There are many types of moderating social media content, starting with pre-moderation and post-moderation. Pre-moderation seeks to review all content and detect inappropriate or misleading content even before it is published. Some social media platforms, especially those that allow business accounts, allow this.
Post-moderation seeks to review and censor any content after publication on social pages and groups.
Both post and pre-moderation techniques can be done manually or be automated. Most companies employ both manual and automated social media moderation tactics. However, one type may be advantageous over the other. For instance, post moderation can be more helpful when moderating comments as it will not disrupt flow of conversations among users.
The other type is reactive moderation, which relies on participants flagging down inappropriate content posted online. Usually applied in the comment sections and forums of blog posts, it involves a user or users alerting and therefore triggering removal of offensive content. It can happen whether the company is monitoring or not monitoring comments on social media.
The user-only moderation is another type of moderation where the user decides on what is appropriate and what is not. The content is then hidden or removed if deemed inappropriate. This type of moderation does not have added costs. Thus brands can use it to save resources.
Formulating rules and policies of moderation
For purposes of effective moderation, and to avoid situations where users are prevented from appropriately airing their disappointments, the company comes up with moderation policies. These policies guide its in-house or outsourced moderators.
A good policy should not be prohibitive. It should encourage individuals to collectively participate in expressing and exchanging ideas. It should encourage the thriving of a community where people respect each other’s opinions and actions. However, it should also protect everyone from situations where individuals may uncontrollably air their views without consideration of other people.
It should entail things like preventing verbal abuse and use of profane language, making insensitive arguments, posting inappropriate content, and discrimination.
A social media moderator is a person tasked with moderating social media communities in line with the guidelines and standards well known to the community. Every website and company will have its rules and policies written clearly about how its community should participate in online commenting and posting. Therefore, it is the role of a social media moderator to check that the rules and policies are adhered to when posting the comments. Otherwise, they will remove those comments and postings.
Traditionally, a company would have to hire a social media moderator. It would have to train him or her as far as responsible monitoring of comments and feedback on company social media pages and groups are concerned. As community managers, social media managers, and specialists, they would need to analyze the posts, tweets, photographs, videos, and memes before or after they are published online. Then there is the removal of this content. However, there would be implementation of software to assist in removing obviously offensive content in addition to the manual methods of removing it.
However, outsourcing social media moderation is preferred and regarded as the most appropriate form of social media moderation today. For one, it reduces the cost of moderation by companies. Companies no longer have to spend vast amounts of resources hiring moderators now and then. Then it removes the need to train and retrain the moderators. Instead, the outsourced company would have to have its trained staff to do the moderation. Hope the above information will guide you.