Category: Engagement

Growing Trust Through Audience Engagement

Trust. In today’s media environment, it’s the cornerstone to growing a loyal community of registered users and paid subscribers.

Users today crave a direct relationship at the source of information, with a brand that provides a safe environment where they can connect and consume information. More and more, users are willing to pay for exactly that, while advertisers are also making it a priority.

But – in an age of “fake news,” data breach scandals, and information overload propelled by social media – site visitors will only become registered users and paid subscribers with brands that they trust. And building that trust means changing up the traditional revenue models a lot of online publishers rely on.

So how do you create enough trust to convert anonymous users into registered subscribers? Then how do you keep it?

“Trust is one of the most discussed topics in Western media at the moment, mainly because there is none.”
—Peter Houston

Trust begins with data handling, privacy policies and regulations

Trust is a driving issue throughout the web today. Social media sites like Facebook have already faced public scrutiny for how they handle the privacy of their users’ data, gaining disfavor after allowing third parties to access users’ personal information for both commercial and political gains. When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before US government officials over the Cambridge Analytica data breach it became clear he’d broken the public’s trust.

And publishers and content producers are just as accountable to their audiences. Those based in the European Union, or who are targeting or monitoring the behavior of audiences in the EU, are also accountable to European regulators. With the newly implemented GDPR regulations, media companies now have a fiduciary responsibility to uphold these laws when engaging with European audiences, and must remain transparent in how personal information data is collected and handled through privacy policies, or face harsh financial penalties. This is a new precedent impacting the web globally, with more countries expected to follow suit.

Whether forced through regulation or the threat of a tarnished public image, online publishers have to earn trust to gain loyalty. And to earn a registered user means providing the details of how their personal information is shared, stored, tracked and deleted.

Engagement builds a sense of belonging

Trust is multi-faceted, though, and the right data policy is only the first step. Advertisers, journalists and loyal community members also want a safe environment where healthy and productive discussions can take place, and where they can get to know your community and develop that trust naturally.

When your writers and journalists participate in the online commenting section, community engagement goes up. With so much time and money being spent on discovery, enabling your audience to connect with both your content and writers through real-time conversations goes a long way in building a loyal relationship with users. Providing author engagement to drive loyalty and trust with your audience keeps them returning and spending more time on your site.

But also ensure that the community you offer is a safe one. Upholding community guidelines in real time with automated moderation can save community members and writers from personal attacks, hate speech and harassment, creating a positive user experience they can all trust. Community management standards can be maintained automatically through moderation technology that will protect your brand and audience from malicious behavior, while auto moderation also offers internal efficiencies so newsrooms no longer have to invest time managing the comments section but can instead focus on high-quality engagement and reporting.

Monetization begins with loyalty

The value of trust and brand loyalty goes beyond just audience engagement, too. In today’s world of big data and robust analytics, advertiser expectations are more sophisticated than ever, and monetization itself relies on users’ relationship with your site.

It’s no longer enough to just get clicks on a page – especially with click-bait and bots inflating those numbers. Instead, advertisers want to see growth in brand loyalty before partnering with publishers. For proof of that, they want and expect to see assurance metrics that prove that audiences are loyal enough to stick around long enough to consume their content. And not only do they want to see engaged users, they need to see brand safety standards in place that will support partnering with the publisher representing their brand.

Advertising isn’t the only monetization model that benefits from trust, either. There is a shift in the publishing world that goes back to the original roots of monetizing the relationship with an audience through paid subscriptions. Today, that takes form through the incorporation of paywalls and a new focus on reader revenue.

Audiences seek out coverage from trusted sources that allows them to actively participate and engage in the conversation as it unfolds – and they’re often willing to pay for that. By offering a seamless personalized user experience, introducing low page-load times and focusing on UX design, media companies can grow audience loyalty through engagement by offering user-centric features that help maintain that relationship. By engaging your users through content and personalized features, you can keep loyal registered users coming back.

Loyalty and trust go hand and hand

Attaining trust and driving a user to become a registered subscriber requires a value exchange between the online publisher and the reader. By giving your community different ways to consume content and interact directly on their trusted channel of choice – your media site – you power that exchange and encourage loyalty and revenue.

By offering protection for users to safely engage while delivering a personalized brand experience, media companies can grow their audiences by developing trust – converting unknown visitors into registered users, and maintaining that trust through the loyalty of a subscriber.

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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5 Ways to Decrease Trolling and Improve the Quality of Your Comments

With the prevalence of online trolls, some organizations have put up their hands and given up on the comment section. But doing so, even temporarily, has major drawbacks for organizations…

Last updated October 28th, 2019

Highlights:

  1. Reward users to encourage desired conversations
  2. Offer moderation tools to your users
  3. Use artificial intelligence in conjunction with your human efforts
  4. Quiz your users to weed out those who haven’t read the full story
  5. Stop anonymous comments

With the prevalence of online trolls, some organizations have put up their hands and given up on the comment section altogether. But doing so, even temporarily, has major drawbacks for organizations and their users.

As Carrie Lysenko — Head of Digital for The Weather Network — pointed out in an RTNDA Canada panel on engagement, turning off comments can result in a significant drop in pageviews and attention time. This echoes Viafoura’s own findings that brands with commenting can increase pageviews by 248% and attention time by 364%. This increased engagement leads to higher registrations and subscriptions since engaged users are more likely to pay for premium services.

And while managing online communities has traditionally been cumbersome and expensive, today there are many cost-effective ways to reduce or eliminate trolling. For media companies, these new tools allow you to not only keep your comment section open, but also to capitalize on your user-generated content.

Reward Users to Promote Civil Comments

Trusted-user badge

Encourage users to submit thoughtful comments by rewarding your best commenters with a trusted-user badge. With this status, an icon will appear beside the user’s name for others to see. These trusted users are also able to publish their comments in real time without being moderated.

Editor’s pick

Another way to reward users is by giving their comment the editor’s pick status. These comments can be featured in prominent positions on your website to model the types of comments you want to receive.

This is also beneficial for SEO, because comments that are placed higher on your webpage will get indexed by Google, and the keywords in those comments may be a closer match to users’ own search terms than those used by a journalist.

Create articles from users’ comments

Many organizations today — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) — are creating stories entirely from their users’ comments. These stories not only reward commenters for their insightful posts, but are cost-effective, quick to publish and receive a surprisingly high amount of attention time and comments. Some even attract more comments than the original piece from which they were taken.

To see the impact of these articles, we tracked the number of comments for eight user-generated blog posts in CBC’s Revenge of the Comment Section, comparing those to the number of comments for their original articles.

The results are depicted in the chart below:

It’s significant to note that while almost all of the original stories received more comments, the user-generated articles often weren’t far behind. And in one instance, for Story 2, there were more comments for the user-generated article (601,000) than for its original article (343,000). Readers also spent approximately 2.3x more time on the former page.

That’s pretty fascinating since these articles can be created at a fraction of the time and cost it takes a journalist to create a new article from scratch.

Offer Content Moderation Tools to Your Users and Managers

Flagging

Allow users to easily flag comments that they find offensive, using a noticeable red flag icon. When a comment receives a predetermined amount of flags, it will enter a queue for review with a moderator who will decide the appropriate action.

Timed user banning

Give short “timeouts” — as little as a few hours, days or months — and notify users as to why they are being banned to help them improve the quality of their comments. Alternatively, users can be permanently banned for repeated offenses.

Dislike button

The dislike button allows users to express their dislike for a comment, without having to flag it (which requires a moderator’s time and resources). We found that this button can reduce flagging by 50% in as little as two weeks upon implementation.

Gamification

Both The New York Times and The Guardian have created games that allow readers to try moderating content. Users are tasked with approving or rejecting comments and providing reasoning for their decisions. This is not only enjoyable for users, but eases some of the burden on moderators.

Use AI Moderation to Eliminate Online Harassment

Whether your organization employs dedicated moderators or tasks other employees with removing the “trash,” you could be saving countless hours and dollars with automated moderation.

Automated moderation uses natural-language processing and artificial intelligence to automatically categorize and eliminate trolling, spam and online harassment.

Viafoura’s Automated Moderation is programmed with over six million variations of problematic words or phrases. This means that it’s able to determine both the subject matter and the sentiment behind users’ comments, detecting and eliminating spam, foul language, abuse, personal attacks and other uncivil comments before other users can even see them.

If the system encounters a new word or sentence that it’s unsure of, it flags the instance for a moderator to review. As a moderator approves or rejects new words, through the power of machine learning, the algorithm will learn the new rules and get smarter over time.

On average, our studies have found that automated moderation has a higher accuracy rate (92%) than human moderation (81%), and reduces 90% of the time and cost it takes to moderate a community manually.

Quiz Your Users

The Norwegian tech news website, NRKbeta, encourages thoughtful comments by asking their readers to prove they read the whole story by taking a quiz. Their organization believes that this quiz can weed out users who haven’t read the story, while also giving users time to reflect on how they will comment instead of just typing a response to a shocking headline.

Their reporter, Stale Grut, comments, “When a lot of journalists hit ‘publish’ I think that they see themselves finished with a story. But we see that you’re only halfway through with the article when you’ve published it.” Their goal is to improve articles through collaboration.

Many commenters agreed that this tactic would promote insightful comments. Here’s what they had to say:

“It WILL raise the discourse, and it will improve the journalism too. And why should some poor intern have to sit and delete all the trash? Let a computer do it.”
—Moira

“I would not object to that if it reduced the uninformed and off-topic as well as useless comments”
—Annette

End Anonymous Commenting

By allowing users to register for your website through one of their social media accounts, with the use of social login, they are less likely to post harassing comments because they can easily be identified.

The social login button also generally increases conversion rates by 20% to 40%, while giving you access to user information that can be used to create targeted messaging.

Increased Engagement = Higher Revenue

If you’re committed to improving the quality of interactions on your website, you may find that using moderators alone can be expensive and time-consuming. Luckily, today we can count on technology to encourage quality comments and eliminate the number of personal attacks. And by improving the quality of interactions on your site, you can look forward to increased engagement, improved brand loyalty and enhanced lifetime value from your users.

Need more help?

If you’re looking to drive engagement and leverage user-generated content, let’s connect.

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How Audience Engagement Tools Impact Revenue

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue. But what is an engaged user exactly? Simply put, it’s a website visitor who…

Last updated June 14th, 2018

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue.

But what is an engaged user exactly?

Simply put, it’s a website visitor who is actively involved with or interested in your brand. In a study led by researchers from Google and Yahoo, they categorized user engagement in four ways:

  • Bounce: user did not engage with the article and left within 10 seconds after arriving
  • Shallow engagement: user stays and reads 50% of the article
  • Deep engagement: user reads more that 50% of the article (means he had to scroll down which indicates commitment)
  • Complete engagement: user posts a comments or a reply on the article

We would define an “engaged user” as anyone who likes, dislikes, shares content or comments, posts a comment, replies to a comment, or follows content/authors/other users. The more actions they complete, the higher their engagement.

It’s also important to note that some actions are “worth” more, or signify higher engagement. For example, a user who posts a comment is more engaged than someone who simply likes content, because they are taking more time to provide a personal opinion. A user who follows an author, story, comment or other user is more engaged than someone who shares an article because they are proactively choosing to be informed and updated in real time, showing significant interest.

So how do you engage your users or encourage them to perform these actions?

Audience engagement tools increase social interactions

Audience engagement tools give users more opportunities to engage with your brand and other community members, much like social media.

Related: Why Attention Time Matters

Media brands and publishers using these types of tools can expect to see significant increases in comments, replies and likes. One such brand, Graham Media Group, saw the following results after implementing engagement tools across seven of their news sites:

59
Increase in total comments & replies
69
increase in total interactions
9
Increase in commentper user
26
Increase in repliesper user

We also found that users who visited pages with engagement tools produced a 248% lift in weekly pageviews per user and a 364% lift in time-spent on site per week.

Total Weekly Pageviews
Per User		 Total Weekly Attention Time
Per User
Did not view engagement tools 2.07 4.07 minutes
Viewed engagement tools 7.20 18.80 minutes
Lift
+248%
+364%

*From analyzing the data across 600+ media organizations

Additionally, across our network of 600 media brands, 80% of all user registrations occurred on pages with engagement tools. And users who register generate 5x more return visits per week compared to non-registered users.

Now we come to the final question: how do these KPIs impact revenue?

Increased ad revenue

Research from data scientists confirms that not only do pageviews per visit increase ad revenue, but so does session time per user, as depicted in the graphs below. It’s also evident that getting users beyond the first few pageviews or seconds offers exponential revenue potential.

You’ll notice that session time has a surprisingly similar positive correlation with revenue as pageviews. Increased attention time means that there is more time for the ads to load on the page, and there is also a greater chance that a user will see an ad and potentially click on it.

Increased subscription revenue

Researchers Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer found that a user’s willingness to pay for premium services is more strongly associated with their online social activity than their content consumption.

In other words, users who engage more with other community members and with content are likelier to subscribe. In order to raise engagement levels, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer suggest content producers should invest in a platform that provides the social engagement tools necessary to encourage active participation.

Doing so can increase subscriptions significantly, as witnessed by a New England media company that saw digital subscriptions jumped by 410% over three years after implementing automated audience engagement and targeting tools. Additionally, by displaying relevant content to anonymous visitors, they were able to increase the number of registered users by 9%.

Interestingly, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer also found that users are more likely to subscribe if they have connections with other subscribers. The more subscriber friends that users have, the likelier they are to pay for premium services. This is likely due to the psychological phenomenon of social proof or social influence, where people mimic the actions of others because they assume it’s the “correct” behavior. Knowing this, publishers may want to consider how they can highlight their subscribed users so that their followers or friends are aware of their purchase decision.

Conclusion

If you have the right audience engagement tools in place, your audience will return to your website organically and regularly. It’s also less expensive to encourage your current website visitors to engage than it is to purchase new eyeballs on an ongoing basis. Not only will you save on marketing and advertising costs, but you’ll also increase your pageviews, attention time, online interactions and – most importantly – your advertising and subscription revenues.

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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Pelmorex Corp. Calls on Viafoura to Help Expand Active Community Membership By Over 50 Percent

Toronto, May 18, 2018: Hoping to cement their position as the online destination for weather and weather-related news, Pelmorex started looking for new ways to build their audience and create a more active and engaged community around their content on the weathernetwork.com and MétéoMédia. To do so, they wanted to build added value for their audience by giving users a chance to connect more frequently on their platforms, in a localized, safe and real-time way. Pelmorex wanted to create new opportunities for engagement with the right technology solution and chose to partner with Viafoura.

“We are so pleased that we have been able to partner with Pelmorex Corp and truly make an impact on their audience engagement objectives: enhancing community standards, increasing registrations and driving user engagement.”
—Allison Munro, Head of Sales & Marketing, Viafoura

With the help of Viafoura Engagement Cloud, audience engagement and moderation tools, Pelmorex Corp. has been able to meet and exceed its original goals, creating a value exchange to drive user registration, enhancing guidelines with automated checks and balances in place, building audience loyalty, and increasing engagement to an all-time high within their community.

“We will continue to focus on growing our digital community to improve engagement on the websites and apps. This includes investing with Viafoura and expanding the suite of features offered by the platform.”
— Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network

“The community as a whole encourages user interactions and repeat visits, as well as content consumption. In terms of user engagement, we have found that compared to non-registered users, registered users visit 31.5% more pages per visit, and more significantly, visit our properties 233% more times per month” said Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network.

Allison Munro, Viafoura’s Head of Sales and Marketing will be hosting a Q&A fireside chat with Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network, as they discuss fostering a thriving digital community. Tune in to learn how The Weather Network is driving real-time audience engagement in a localized way.

Learn more in the upcoming Viafoura Talks webinar

The Weather Network—Growing Your Digital Audience

Watch the on-demand webinar now:

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The Power of Performance: The Viafoura commitment to site optimization

Media companies and content sites invest heavily in optimizing their page load times, which is why Viafoura works to ensure that we minimize the impact our solutions and tools have on the performance of the pages they appear on.

As users move increasingly to mobile for content consumption, and as search engines begin to factor performance into search ranking, it is increasingly important to ensure that media companies, content sites and their selected vendor solutions are laser-focused on optimizing performance.

Our dedication and focus on supporting the goals of our clients continues to pay off, as we currently lead the industry with product load times that are 63% to 190%1 faster than our competitors. Our solutions enable our clients to be user-focused, providing them with the tools needed to create an enjoyable and engaging experience on their sites, which has proven time and time again to be the best long-term strategy for building online communities.

Why performance is important

Put simply, people are impatient and have almost unlimited choice. Data shows that reducing load time has a measurable and meaningful impact on bounce rates. From one recent study, reducing page load time from seven seconds to five seconds decreased the bounce rate by 10.1% and increases pageviews by 32%.2

Because users favor performance, search engines, especially Google, already factor performance into search rankings.3 As a result, not only does performance remain a bounce risk factor, it is becoming a discovery risk factor and needs to be considered as part of any SEO strategy.

Key factors for measuring third-party script performance

Bundle size and render time are the two key factors that should be measured to understand the impact of the tools you load on your site:

1

Bundle Size

Bundle size is the actual amount of data that the tool needs to load on the page in order to function. This can impact the overall size of the page, which can potentially impact performance depending on factors such as the speed of the user’s current internet connection. While a useful quantitative measure, bundle size is very indirectly correlated with how the site actually feels to users.
2

Render Time

Render time is arguably the most important factor for measuring third-party tools on your site, and is defined as the time it takes for the tool to begin loading its code until it is fully displayed on your site. Render time is the qualitative perception that your end users will have of the performance of your site, and is what search engines are most focused on with regard to ranking.

Perception is critical

When measuring bundle size and render time as it relates to incorporating the tools used on your site, it’s important to remember that perception is key. Render time will have a much larger effect on the performance of your site within Google’s algorithms, compared to bundle size. Viafoura factors both measurements into all of its offerings, ensuring efficient load times across its customers’ web pages, and keeping overall user experience in line with your brand’s standards.

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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  1. Testing conducted in internal lab using similar feature configurations in real world settings. Care was taken to test on the same hardware and network conditions. Our tools were tested against all the major commenting systems including Coral Talk, Facebook comments, Spot.im, Livefyre and Disqus.
  2. How Page Load Time Affects Bounce Rate and Page Views – Section.io.” 10 Aug. 2017, https://www.section.io/blog/page-load-time-bounce-rate/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
  3. “Google Search will start ranking faster mobile pages higher in July ….” 17 Jan. 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/17/google-search-will-start-ranking-faster-mobile-pages-higher-in-july/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.

Digital Engagement and Adapting to Change

Viafoura’s Director of Product – Engagement Tools, Dan Seaman joined Shari Medini on the Push Pull Sales & Marketing podcast, where they discussed the importance of adapting to changing traditional and social media landscapes in order to maintain and increase engagement.

Topics in the podcast:

  • The effects of how quality content distribution is often reliant on one or two social media and search engine giants
  • The importance of the relationships you build with your audiences
  • How building these quality relationships, whether you’re a large publisher or smaller content creator, will help drive engagement regardless of changes to platforms or algorithms

Adapting to change as a content publisher with Dan Seaman (ep. 61)

Director of Product
Dan Seaman

Dan Seaman is a 15 year digital media professional and enthusiast and has held key product strategy and leadership roles managing consumer products for large media groups like St. Joseph Media, Quebecor, TC Media, and The Globe and Mail.

CBC and The Weather Network Discuss Online Commenting

The Importance of Commenting from RTDNA 2017 Conference

In the RTDNA session, Commentary, Commenting and Diversifying Your Voices, our Head of Marketing, Allison Munro, moderated a conversation with news media executives from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and The Weather Network (Pelmorex Media). The two panelists included Jack Nagler, the Director of Journalistic Public Accountability and Engagement at CBC, and Carrie Lysenko, the Head of Digital at Pelmorex Media. Their discussion explored the pros and cons of online commenting and how news media organizations can overcome the challenges.

How Important is Commenting in News Media?

For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), commenting is not just a value add; it’s critically important for their brand strategy. One of their goals is to provide Canadians with a place to explore their diverse opinions, and commenting supports this vision. Nagler states that commenting has helped them become a better newsroom because their readers improve the stories being told.

At The Weather Network, Lysenko stated that commenting is important because nature-enthusiasts want a forum to share their opinions, photos and videos. Lysenko also noted that when they turned off comments, there was a significant drop in pageviews and attention time.

This echoes our findings that brands with commenting can increase their pageviews by 248% and attention time by 364%. Researchers for the MIT Sloan Management Review also confirm that users’ willingness to pay for subscriptions increases with their growing online social activity.

“Only an engaged user will become a long-term subscriber.”
—Tobias Henning, GM of BILD

A majority of website visitors would also agree that website commenting is valuable. In a recent survey of their audience, CBC found that 70% of respondents said that comments were important to them. Furthermore, they saw that 70% of website visitors spend at least 15% of their time onsite just reading comments.

Using Comments to Create New Stories

CBC receives story tips and article corrections within their comment section from their loyal readers and watchers. Nagler asserts that audience contributions add a lot of value to their articles as they spur further discussions and stories.

He gave an example about an article on a wedding party that fell ill during their stay at a resort. After reading the story, another reader commented that she too got sick at the same place. From there, an investigative story was born, providing valuable information to other travellers.

CBC now takes their top comments and creates stories from them in the Revenge of the Comment Section. As these stories are made from comments, they offer a quick and cost-effective way for publishers to post new content.

Similarly, users share their photos and videos with The Weather Network, which drives further engagement and new content. Lysenko described when The Weather Network connected one of their website contributors to Canada Post to create an official stamp. After viewing the photo he submitted, they made arrangements to create the stamp and tracked his story on their website.

 

Three SEO Benefits of Online Commenting

User-generated content, such as comments, can be indexed by Google if it’s placed higher on the webpage. For example, editors can choose their favorite comments and place those quotes within the body of an article.

Furthermore, pages with active content updates, such as new comments, can trigger additional reindexing and improve the recency and relevance of the page in search results.

Your audience may also use keywords around a topic that differ from what journalists write, and can provide closer matches to search terms.

The Truth Behind Facebook Commenting

While your Facebook page may be a hotspot for online commenting, it can’t take the place of commenting on your website. And it’s not only because your direct website visitors are more loyal than your Facebook readers, but also because Facebook doesn’t give publishers all their first-party audience data from commenters. (Similarly, Facebook’s free commenting platform for websites also keeps your invaluable data.)

Both CBC and The Weather Network recognize that publishers should focus on getting readers to comment on their websites and collecting their audience data. That doesn’t mean Facebook or its tools shouldn’t be used at all; in fact, Social Login is an extremely valuable tool for news media websites.

When users are able to register for news websites through their social media account, this greatly reduces friction when signing up. It can even increase conversion rates by 20% to 40%. Lysenko adds that if you have the capability to import data from their social account into their user profile on your website, then you’re taking advantage of Facebook login without giving away your data.

“Direct visitors are more loyal than Facebook visitors.”
—Terri Walter, CMO of Chartbeat

Moderation is the #1 Challenge for Community Management

Both panelists say that the greatest challenge to commenting is moderating online discussions in real time. With so many trolls online, moderation is vital for publishers who want to provide a safe space for their users. And according to Engaging News Project, users’ interest in returning to a website almost doubles if they know the discussion will be civil.

CBC found difficulties with both pre-moderation and post-moderation. With the former method, moderators review comments before they get published. But this time-consuming task doesn’t allow for real-time discussions, which are so important for timely news and weather events. With the latter method, users are able to post comments without review, and inappropriate comments only get removed if they are flagged by the community and reviewed by a moderator. While this avenue is much less time-consuming, brands risk having content on their website that doesn’t align with their guidelines.

Like some media companies, CBC has even opted out of commenting altogether on certain stories that may trigger heated arguments. Similarly, The Weather Network chose to disable commenting on stories about climate change, finding too many undesirable comments between advocates and deniers.

Since then, The Weather Network has decided to employ automated moderation to manage their online communities. Automated moderation uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect and delete offensive comments. This allows conversations to unfold in real time while maintaining a brand’s community guidelines.

Human Moderation

81
Accuracy

Automated Moderation

92
Accuracy

They have also decided to offer self-moderation tools that allow users to personalize their online experience. These include the ability to mute other users and to dislike and flag comments.

Save Time and Resources with Automated Moderation

Website commenting has been an important feature for both the CBC and The Weather Network, helping them increase brand loyalty.

It’s also been invaluable to their audiences, who enjoy reading the comment section and sharing their content with others. However, many users get deterred from engaging on your website if the discussions aren’t civil and respectful.

Automated moderation is the latest solution to this problem, giving media brands a cost-effective way to moderate their communities. Media organizations have also shown that automated moderation drives further engagement, by increasing comments, likes and registered users, while significantly reducing flagging and the time and effort needed by moderators.

Interested in learning more about Automated Moderation?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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Driving SEO with User Generated Content

Viafoura is your partner in audience development and as such, we take SEO very seriously. We are one of the only major commenting and engagement platforms that natively support search indexing of our commenting tool (Facebook comments and Disqus do not). But SEO goes far beyond just allowing indexing. Here are some of the ways that Viafoura enables and optimizes SEO from our widgets on behalf of our clients:

Speed

Google has stated publicly that site speed is a significant factor in search ranking. Independent studies have confirmed that improving time to render, and especially start rendering time, are very highly correlated with higher page rank.

Viafoura helps to minimize the impact that our widgets have on site speed in the following ways:

  • Asynchronous loading: Our Javascript is loaded after displaying much of the immediately consumable page to the user. This aids in load speed and start rendering time while retaining the dynamic elements of the site.
  • On-demand loading: Comment widgets can be heavy due to the volume of content that they deliver and their technical complexity. For this reason, we load our comment widget only if the user scrolls close to where the widget will load. This ensures that our widget does not impact the start render time on the page.
  • Batching: A technique whereby we bundle multiple API calls into one which can speed up the experience, especially for mobile users.
  • Multiple Bundles: We break our Javascript into separate bundles which improves efficiency by only loading the components that are needed on that particular page.
  • Minification: Our Javascript is minified, a type of compression which removes unnecessary white-space and characters from the code. This results in reducing a file-size to almost one quarter of the original size.
  • Compression: We compress all communication from our servers using GZIP, which provides additional file-size savings.
  • CDN: We use a CDN (content delivery network with servers all over the world) to deliver our content (excluding API results) at low latency worldwide, by geographical region.
  • Caching: We cache our files so browsers will only download our files when they change (ie: once per release) except for critical components.
  • WebSockets: We use WebSockets to produce our real time events using an open data connection.
  • Font-icons: We use font-icons to bundle our icons into one file to reduce requests.
  • Avoid Sequential Requests: We minimize the number of sequential requests, reducing load times.

User-Generated Content

Viafoura Civility tools: our industry leading civility tools allow you to control the discourse on your site, ensuring the discourse is inline with your community guidelines, without needing a massive moderation effort. These tools include:

  • Automated On-site Moderation: Utilizing artificial intelligence based natural language processing and machine learning to detect and eliminate harassment, abuse, and other uncivil comments before they go live, ensuring that potentially damaging comments are prevented from being indexed.
  • Community Management: Empower your community to help manage the discourse themselves through flag threshold disabling of comments in addition to user-to-user muting.
  • Email Verification: Validate your users and impede multi-account creation with a sophisticated email verification system.
  • Display Name Moderation: Ensure that the display names on your website are not being used to post objectionable content or spam and therefore being read by search engine bots.
  • Avatar Verification: Prevent obscene or objectionable images from being posted in profile pictures by moderating user profile pictures.
  • User Banning: Allow moderators to give short “time outs” and inform users why they are being banned to help them improve.
  • Spam Detection: We offer industry leading 3-layer spam detection including NLP spam pattern detection.

Promoted comments: Our civility tools are the first line of defense to ensure the actual and perceived (by Google in this case) quality of your community. In addition, we have widgets that can be used to showcase the best comments higher in the page, thereby ensuring that the best comments are being indexed: These include:

  • Editor’s pick pull quote: This widget allows you to pull the very best of your comments into the body of your articles. This widget loads extremely fast, and places your user-generated content high in the page ensuring that Google will index the content. Google appears to favor content within the body of an article for ranking purposes.
  • Editor’s pick list: This highly customizable widget allows you to showcase the best of the best comments anywhere on your site by pulling in the best curated comments from your whole site or from the section that the comments appeared in.
  • Trending comments: This widget can be configured to showcase the comments that are getting the most “likes” on your site. This is a less curated way to promote the best comments on your site.

Dynamic page content: Pages with active content updates, such as new comments being posted, can trigger additional reindexing and improve the recency and relevance of the page in search results.

UGC Keywords: Terminology your audience may use around a topic can often differ from what journalists would write and can provide closer matches to user-generated search terms.

Competitive Comparison

Article Indexed Widgets Indexed Commenting
Indexed		 AI enforced civility*
Facebook Comments N/A
Disqus N/A **
Viafoura

*Prevents bad comments from impacting SEO
**Requires complex server integration

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that search engine algorithms are proprietary and dynamic, so the ways that site content and widgets can impact search ranking is always changing. That being said, Viafoura strikes a careful balance between maximizing loading speed, ensuring that Google and other search engines recognize your vibrant community, and ensuring that poor quality UGC is removed before it gets indexed. Combined, Viafoura’s tools can be a powerful contributor to your SEO strategy.

Related: The Power of Performance: The Viafoura commitment to site optimization

So what are you waiting for?

 See how the Viafoura Viafoura Engagement Cloud supports your SEO efforts. Let’s connect.

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