Comment moderation Archives | Page 2 of 3

Best Practices From A Data-Driven Audience Engagement Manager

Audience engagement managers have become a core component of publishing teams in newsrooms across the country. An audience engagement manager’s primary purpose is to manage how the audience evolves from casual readers to engaged members of the community.

To do that, they need the right audience engagement solution to moderate how people flow through the customer journey across your website. You want a platform that will encourage conversations to occur about your content so that people form an attachment to your brand and your community.

Brand attachment and affinity breeds customer loyalty. As an audience engagement manager, customer loyalty is one of the most important KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. Using the right audience engagement platform, you can leverage detailed audience profiles built upon first-party data insights to create the types of personalised content experiences that will help build that customer loyalty.

Know your target conversion rates

The aim of most publications is to increase the number of subscribers who willfully choose to consume and interact with your content. These companies use metrics like paywall stop rates to measure how many unique visitors are choosing to go beyond the paywall and become subscribers. A metre stop rate of 5 to 7 percent should be the target to measure effectiveness; if you’re performing above that threshold, you have a very active and engaged audience.

As the audience engagement manager, you also want to segment the types of people who are hitting your paywalls into different tiers of users. Start by creating segments for the one-time and passive visitors, which are people who interact with one to five pieces of content over the course of a month’s timeline.

Then there are the active users who regularly consume your content, perhaps on a daily basis. According to The Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a subsidiary of the Harvard Kennedy School research centre, approximately 9 percent of your users can be classified as active or regular readers of your content.

With those benchmarks in hand, an audience engagement manager can formulate strategies for how to meet or exceed those targets.

Identify the needs and interests of key demographics

As an audience engagement manager, you need to create content and communication strategies that speak the same language of your target audience. To do that, you need to develop deeper insights into what topics get their attention, how they’re likely to interact with different pieces of content and, perhaps most importantly, what is least likely to earn their attention and engagement.

One of the best ways to monitor that engagement is to use the right on-site metrics. As an audience engagement manager, you can use first-party data like page views, on-site engagement actions, time spent on pages, overall retention rates, and more insights to build rich audience profiles.

Those profiles will tell you more about what your readers are most interested in when interacting with content on your website. Using those insights, you can develop personal engagement tactics to grow the size of your audience base and guide more people to become those highly valued active consumers of your content.

What to look for in an audience engagement platform

So what is the type of solution best suited to help you create effective audience engagement strategies that help drive higher subscriptions and fuel growth for the business? Above all else, you need to know that the platform you integrate into your site can help you achieve your goals for the business.

Remember that sustainable audience growth is based on engagement and the valuable exchange of moments you have with your community. A beneficial audience engagement platform should help you acquire predictive analytics and data-driven insights to make logical decisions with your content, which will further enhance the value of your website experience.

Focus on how to drive up customer loyalty

For example, a strong audience engagement platform will improve engagement across your website. It can potentially increase conversion rates up to 25 times above existing site conversion rates.

Higher engagement and conversion rates is an excellent indicator of user lifetime value, which is indicative of strong customer loyalty among your users. Graham Media Inc. was one media company that sought to achieve this exact objective and, thanks to their partnership with Viafoura, they were able to boost user lifetime value by over 150 percent.

Final takeaways

Above all else, any audience engagement solution you implement should be provided by experts that can function as partners to your business rather than simple vendors. Your partner should be proactive by providing you with strategic recommendations on how best to gain those valuable insights from the platform. Once you have that first-party data on hand, you can focus on how to implement the takeaways and optimise your content to help drive direct impact on your business.

By leaning on insights gleaned from these platforms, audience engagement managers can spend more time on the big picture. You can focus more time coaching the rest of your publication team on how best to use these insights and improve engagement with audiences across all digital channels.

The Twitter takeover — another reason to build engaged and active communities on your owned and operated properties

Monday April 25th, 2022, Twitter’s board accepted billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social media company and take it private. The announcement ends what can only be called a weeks-long media firestorm as Musk offered to buy the company for $44 billion. Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 for each share of common stock — a significant premium over the stock’s price from just months earlier.

Musk has often referred to himself as a “free speech supporter” and has been a loud critic of content moderation policies put in place by organizations, like Twitter, to stem the flow of misinformation, enforce authenticity and prevent harassment.

Musk also seems to believe that he’s advancing the free speech movement by taking over the social platform. For instance, he claims that he wants “to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.”

Generally, the news has raised eyebrows.

Between Musk’s recent statements and the implied return of users currently banned from the platform, many believe he’s bound to run into conflict with multiple regulators. Now, Thierry Breton, the European Union’s commissioner for the internal market, has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must follow the rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online.

What does this mean to publishers dependent on social media platforms like Twitter? According to Musk, he plans to have less content moderation on Twitter. This means that publishers will soon be at the mercy of his social media strategies, which will be based on his own definition of truthful or accurate news and a free-sharing audience.

The bottom line is that publishers must be in control of their community guidelines and content moderation. In other words, they need to be in a position where they can protect against misinformation and personal attacks on their journalists.

For this reason, publishers need to invest in building their communities and audience conversations away from social media. After all, there’s no better way to keep audience engagement where it belongs — directly on publisher-owned websites!

Many digital publishers have already started moving to adopt on-site engagement strategies and solutions, including real-time conversations and live Q&As, to grow audiences, gather first-party data and ultimately drive sustainable monetization. However, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has highlighted the need to accelerate that strategy.

Rest assured that wherever Twitter goes from here, Viafoura will be ready to clear you a path for building an engaged and safe online community.

4 ways to know if the comment moderation solution you need is also aligned with your editorial brand

Choosing the right moderation solution can be challenging, and many organizations find that their current moderation solution isn’t up to the standards of their brand. When your comment moderation solution is not aligned with your brand, it reflects poorly on you and alienates your user community.

If you want to build a thriving brand, you need to offer an exceptional experience for your audience. That means not settling for mediocre moderation and having a community engagement solution with a full suite of tools at your disposal to moderate your community, including shadow banning, IP lookup, troll management, likes, and follows.

A comment moderation solution that’s truly aligned with your brand doesn’t just seamlessly blend in with your environment; it also reflects your brand’s value and enhances your business.

Research shows that when you implement engagement solutions across your platform, anonymous users spend more time on your site and become 25.4 times more likely to convert.

This article will examine some of the core features and attributes of an on-brand moderation solution that can protect your community, your newsroom, and your brand as you grow over the long term.

1. Predictive analytics

Using a solution with predictive analytics is vital for gaining better insights into your community, so you know and understand what matters to them most. Without it, your content strategy will be based on guesswork.

Your ability to offer relevant content and experiences to users will determine the strength of your brand. If you’re a brand that offers up-to-the-minute coverage on topics that interest users, they’re going to engage with your brand more than they would if you offer them stories that are better suited to another target audience.

2. Are you working with a vendor or a partner?

If you’re looking for a solution that has the capacity to evolve with your brand long-term, then you need to ensure you’re working with a partner rather than a vendor. While a vendor will place ads across digital assets to maximize your online visibility and offer revenue share, they will treat you as more of a financial investment than a client.

A true partner will work alongside you on a SaaS payment model to help you innovate new strategies that drive registrations, and acquire unique user data that allows you to enhance your brand and the way you serve customers.

3. Automated moderation

When building a user community on your website, you need to have a strategy to deal with toxicity if you want to protect your users and your brand. Failure to moderate toxic comments can be extremely damaging to your organization’s reputation.

For instance, Twitter’s inability to deal with hateful comments has damaged the organization’s brand by having users call the platform out for being a haven for toxicity, with Amnesty International going as far as branding the site “a toxic place for women.”

As a result, it’s essential to have a chat room with automated moderation to ensure that you can keep the conversation free of abuse, harassment, hate, and uncivil comments in real-time.

It’s important to remember that a quality moderation solution isn’t a banned word list; it’s a complete AI-driven solution with semantic moderation that can infer the intent and meaning of uncivil comments independently.

4. First-party data collection

Any effective community engagement and moderation solution should have the ability to gather first-party data.

Deploying an engagement tool that can collect first-party data is vital to making sure that you can develop detailed insights into your audience, which you can use to offer personalized content recommendations and news feeds that keep them engaged.

For example, simply offering your users a personalized news feed can help you generate 3.15 more page views.

By collecting first-party data, you can identify what topics users are interested in, what authors they’re most likely to follow, and recommend pieces that are not just likely to engage them on the site but that are also going to interest them.

Elevating your brand with comment moderation

A comment moderation solution that is aligned with your brand will elevate the user experience and make your audience trust you even more.

Features like AI-driven predictive analytics, first-party data collection and automated moderation give you a strong foundation to start building a safe and thriving user community.

Anything less, and you run the risk of offering a poorly optimized, irrelevant, and toxic community experience for your users and your journalists.

When you know more about your audience, you pave the way for growth

The more you understand your users, the more opportunity you have to grow your community of followers. And the more you grow your community, the more your business can ultimately generate revenue and brand awareness. But without first-party data about your audience, you’re working from an incomplete picture.

To grow, media brands need to know the profile of their users, their preferences and their behaviours. It won’t just help you improve and personalize your content lineup; obtaining rich first-party data also empowers you to supply advertisers with the crucial targeted audience segments they want.

Building engagement to gain data

Our research has found that engagement leads to loyalty because it creates experiences users will stick around for. The longer they stick around, the more likely they are to register, which will give you access to their real-time data.

So what types of engaging experiences can you provide your users? We’ve identified six Viafoura solutions that can help your content convert users from unknown to known, including: moderated conversations, or safe spaces for registered users to discuss content; follow buttons; live chats around a topic, event or video; social share bars; trending conversations; and live blogs, or real-time interactive content posts.

For example, Viafoura’s personalized newsfeeds are onsite feeds similar to a Facebook feed, aggregating all the interactions that are relevant to a user, including what and who they follow. Our data has found that they generate 3.15 more page views per month among both anonymous and registered users.

How data helps your content strategy

With 64% of consumers willing to give up their data for relevant services, personalization is your key to giving readers what they want. When your newsroom has access to your audience’s data insights, they become empowered to create a personalized experience for the user, which is increases audience retention.

They can do this by extracting audience insights from Viafoura’s engagement solutions. One example is Viafoura’s Community Chat, which allows media companies to host real-time chats around popular content.

“With (Viafoura’s) Community Chat, we’re delivering more value to the fans, while also increasing engagement by 150%,” says Kristian Walsh, head of sports audience engagement strategy at Reach PLC.

So what kind of behaviour and preferences can you track from users, and what can that tell you about them? For starters, look at what types of content are driving people to engage. What are the topics and themes that are capturing interest? Who are the writers of this content? You can then rank an article’s performance based on clicks and audience segments to help determine the topics your readers are most interested in.

By understanding who their readers are, what they’re interested in and how they express that interest, newsrooms can align on a high-conversion content strategy based on a strong relationship with their audience.

How data incentivizes your advertisers

That rich audience data allows you to understand your audience more intimately, but it also better equips you to provide targeted audience segments for advertisers. Advertisers today are looking beyond clicks, and are seeking metrics like time-spent, return visits and number of page views: all signs of an engaged audience. So the more you know about your own audience, the more appealing you can make your site to advertisers.

“Viafoura gives us access to valuable engagement data that helps drive business decisions,” says Philippa Jenkins, the head of registered audience at The Independent. “We know what content topics and formats are resonating most with our users, so we can deliver more of what they want.”

User registrations, direct newsletter sign-ups and a view into audience interactions allow you to understand your users at the engagement level, to inform your sales team, and paint a better picture for advertisers.

In fact, the New York Times is capitalizing on its first-party data, having found that digital ads that used its first-party data accounted for 20% of its core ad revenue, up from 7% the year before. Ad Exchanger reported that subscriptions also soared during the same period, hitting 5.1 million digital news subscribers and 1.6 million subscribers for other products.

Brands that glean actionable insights on their data will be much better positioned to deliver the goods that advertisers want, in an age where advertisers have become much more savvy in the data they demand.

Why taking control of your community on your own platform is a much better alternative to social media

Imagine you’re the owner of a local store. I stroll in one day and tell you to let a group of nameless, faceless people somewhere far away decide how you can market to your clientele and how you can interact with them. They get to decide what the rules are and they can change them whenever they feel like.

You’d probably take a polite pass on that deal.

Yet that’s a little bit like what millions of online brands do when they hand over the keys to their community of followers to social media. The reality is that those platforms exert much more influence over communities than one might think. When brands don’t actually own all the access to their community on their own terms, it can hamper their business and their ability to grow.

There’s only one real solution to this conundrum, and it involves you taking control.

What’s wrong with having a community on Facebook?

Letting social media call the shots on engagement around your content can be risky for several reasons, says Mark Zohar, president and COO at Viafoura.

For example, the moderation that happens on Facebook or Twitter is subject to the policies that they create and enforce. But those policies may not be the community guidelines you would support on your owned and operated properties.

If you only engage your audience on social media, you don’t actually own that customer relationship. You also don’t own the data insights and you’re vulnerable to a change in algorithm or a change in a platform’s community policies.

“And all of a sudden it’s, ‘holy cow, my community disappeared and I can’t control that,’” says Zohar. “We’re not saying social media is going away, but a lot of brands need to start thinking about how they can reclaim their audience.”

How do I take control of my own platform?

When users come to your website, you need to provide an exciting or interesting reason for them to stay. If they can’t engage or participate, they’re probably going to leave and return to social media.

Simply put, your audience wants to be able to engage in a community, something Zohar calls “the heart of every single product.” Providing a space for that community to thrive will help, but it has to be captivating.

“Brands need to learn from social media to create social experiences,” says Zohar. “They need to really understand that their audiences are inherently social and not to just say ‘okay, go do that somewhere else and come back for a passive consumption experience.’”

Tech platforms like Facebook are experts at providing “value-exchange moments,” or instances in which a user feels willing to reveal personal information, usually in the form of registration, in return for an incentive. But that’s just the beginning.

Create contact and connections

Zohar suggests several ways you can connect with your audience on your own platform once they’ve logged in.

One of them is to build a community feed where users can like, comment and interact with people they follow. Viafoura gathered data from various clients and found that with user generated content, you’re going to get 10% creators and 90% consumers, but a significant portion of your overall users, about 20-25%, spend a huge amount of time engaging with and consuming content. They need a space to do that and you can provide that space.

“Publishers can inject their own content and other interesting content in the feed so it becomes this great place where users spend a lot of time engaging with content and interacting related to their community interests,” said Zohar.

With tools crafted by Viafoura, publishing brands can allow their users to comment, like and generate discussion. They can even engage directly with brands who can participate in the conversation through things like live Q&As or AMAs, where reporters or experts can take questions from readers and answer in real time.

The payback? Community loyalty

All of these engagement and user retention capabilities add up to loyalty over the long run.

Viafoura’s research shows that these users “pay you back” through time spent on your site, generating more page views, increasing propensity to subscribe to premium products and ideally, spending money on your site. With the right solutions, they also give you the data insights into their preferences, interests and sentiments that you can use to tailor content offers and advertising strategies.

“All that happens only if you have access to those users on your own site where you can do all that,” added Zohar.

Why turning off the comments is a threat, not a solution, for media companies

Trolls, spam and misinformation have given commenting spaces a bad reputation.

Websites that are flooded with offensive and untrustworthy comments can lose the respect of advertisers and users. Publishers often think that the only solution is to give up and close down their commenting tools.

But shutting off the comments isn’t a solution; it’s a catalyst for serious business problems.

The issue with dropping commenting from your website

The reality is that media companies suffer the second they get rid of their website’s social tools.

“(Without comments, companies) lose a direct connection with their audience (and just provide) passive content for readers, as opposed to creating active opportunities for feedback and opinions,” says Mark Zohar, Viafoura’s president and COO. “That feedback loop between content, publisher and author is critical for high-performing content and re-engaging audiences.”

In a nutshell, media organizations need commenting tools to get closer to their communities and create better experiences for audience members and staff.

Companies that drop their comments aren’t solving anything; they’re just allowing their worst audience members to damage their brands.

Throw in the fact that 50% of new user registrations happen on web pages with commenting tools, and it’s easy to see why social spaces are must-have website features for all publishers hoping to grow closer to their audiences.

Cupped human hands on a table with speech bubbles in the middle.

How to run safe and successful commenting spaces

Comment moderation is a publisher’s greatest weapon against offensive user behaviour. The importance of supporting any online social tools with advanced comment moderation services cannot be overstated — it’s what separates the safe, lucrative social spaces from those that are doomed to fail.

Media companies that pair their online commenting spaces with effective moderation give themselves the greatest chance to grow their audiences, customer loyalty and revenue without damaging their reputations.

“People want to participate in communities where they feel safe,” Zohar explains. “We know from our data that communities and sites with active, positive moderation that’s civil generate engagement on-site.”

When protected by Viafoura’s automated moderation services, our data shows that customers have seen engaged users spend 168 times more time on-site, gain up to 2,000 new monthly registrations, and view 3.6 times more pages than media companies without commenting tools.

“Where (commenting) doesn’t happen, we see a drop-off in engagement,” adds Zohar.

Instead of ditching comments, media companies can draw on moderation to create safe environments that invite journalists, readers and commenters to communicate and connect with each other.

Nervous that moderation might be too expensive to invest in?

There are plenty of cost-effective AI-based and human moderation options available. You can also look for an engagement tool provider that includes moderation services directly in their commenting solution for an affordable, hassle-free experience.

Get rewarded with user data

Newsrooms don’t get much value from sending content into a void, where they never hear about it again. Moderated commenting tools give journalists the chance to have positive conversations about their content, get feedback about it from their registered readers, and use that information to make content even more compelling in the future.

This means that as registered users leave comments on your site, you can expand your user data beyond their general profiles to include information on audience behaviours, interests, sentiments, propensity and purchase intent.

Once you have that declarative data, you can feed it into your business model.

“Allowing for users to communicate directly with you and (other readers) around content creates insights, (leading) to rich user profiles that evolve over time as they participate actively in the community,” says Zohar. “By understanding user behaviour on-site as well as user interest and propensity… publishers can improve things like newsletter curation, sign-ups and target users for subscriptions.”

The more first-party data you can get from commenters, the better you can group like-minded users together to personalize their experiences, send them subscription messages and show them relevant ads.

In other words, your commenting solution has the potential to give you an edge over your competitors. So whatever you do, don’t turn off the comments!

Want to know more about our commenting and engagement solutions? Click here to check out our product suite.

Fighting for time and attention: A glimpse into The Independent’s successful audience engagement strategy

The Independent has recently experienced quite a lot of success in growing its registered user base and engaging its audience with appealing digital experiences.

At WAN-IFRA’s Virtual World News Media Congress 2021, The Independent’s head of registered audience, Philippa Jenkins, and Viafoura’s president and COO, Mark Zohar, gave attendees a snapshot of the media company’s audience engagement strategy. Here are some highlights.

Why users spent 15x more time on-site after registering to The Independent

As Jenkins mentioned during the conference, audience engagement sparks greater economic value. The Independent, for example, found that its registered website users spent about 15 times more time on-site than anonymous visitors. This additional time that registered users spend exploring and interacting around the brand offers in-depth information about their preferences, opinions and habits.

As a result, The Independent has been able to identify where users are engaging the most to target them with more relevant experiences, content and offers.

But this build-up of engagement and first-party data didn’t happen on its own. To keep registered users from losing interest and encourage them to subscribe, The Independent implemented several Viafoura solutions, including a personalized news feed, browser notifications and a moderated conversations space.

The personalized feed and notifications showcase where the most active users are on the company’s site and point users to the latest interactions with their comments. Both of these tools established a sense of community for The Independent’s users and produced opportunities for re-engagement. In addition, Viafoura’s digital experience tools offered the media company a way to gather critical first-party data as users interact with one another and consume content.

“Without engagement on your site, you have a passive audience that’s just reading your content — and passive experiences no longer meet the needs of today’s audiences,” says Zohar. “Passive visitors can’t connect with your journalists, they won’t leave their opinions and you can’t get their sentiments or useful engagement data.”

Ultimately, Viafoura’s digital experience solutions allowed The Independent to identify and elevate the most relevant spaces on the site to keep users hooked on its brand.

How 'The Independent' is making the most of its engagement tools

Even with effective personalization and social tools, media organizations must put time and energy into experimenting with ways to draw more attention toward on-site engagement opportunities. After all, there are countless other publishers all battling for your audience’s attention.

In The Independent’s case, Jenkins outlines how the organization has achieved positive results hosting Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions through Viafoura’s moderated Conversations solution.

The AMAs give registered users the chance to voice their questions to an expert or journalist around a particular topic, further connecting them to the brand. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between The Independent’s AMAs and the time users spend on-site. These sessions alone earned the publisher one million views on content related to these events.

Zohar also highlights that registered comment readers and writers generate 46 times more page views and spend 168 times more time on-site per month compared to anonymous visitors.

Jenkins explains that the commenting experience can become much richer during an AMA event because users get direct attention from the community host in return for their engagement.

“For journalists, AMAs are a great way to establish a following that will engage directly with them,” Zohar says.

In today’s highly competitive media industry, audience attention, revenue and loyalty all start with engagement. And it’s up to publishers to develop an effective strategy with the right tools and user experiences to consistently earn their audience’s attention.

The Only Guide To Comment Moderation You Will Ever Need

A quick search of the Internet will show you a plethora of guides on using comment moderation features provided by popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. It comes as no surprise; the liberty of free speech is abused quite often on the web, where trolls and toxic individuals can hide behind the relative anonymity of their usernames. And at the scale on which some platforms operate, it’s impossible to have enough mods to catch and handle every single offensive comment or inappropriate post that gets left on their pages.

Comment moderation tools offer a relatively hassle-free way to keep your brand’s web platform a safe and inclusive space for everyone. Viafoura includes comment moderation functionality within our software suite, and we’re a big fan of using them to supplement your efforts to regulate and moderate the type of conversations and content that gets shared on your platform.

But successfully performing comment moderation takes more than just leaving it to the algorithm; any digital media brand that’s looking to develop the right kind of community around their content needs to understand the principles behind the act. This post aims to cover the essentials of comment moderation and how you can use them as the basis for your own approach to comment moderation on your website.

The importance of comment moderation

Comment moderation requires so much time and attention because failing to have proper measures in place can expose your community to profanity, abuse, spam, and other unsavoury elements. Not only does this harm your overall image as a brand, but it also discourages prospective audience members and first-time visitors from coming back. Every brand’s responsibility is to ensure that their community is healthy and free from this kind of toxicity, and comment moderation is just one of the methods that make it possible.

But note that the aim of comment moderation isn’t to suppress individual opinions or views that are critical or against your brand’s interests. There’s a fine line between moderation and censorship. Doing it for the right reasons is essential to ensuring your digital media brand nurtures a positive relationship with its audience. Focus on creating an environment that facilitates healthy discussion and respectful exchanges.

Tips towards impactful comment moderation

We mentioned earlier that if you’re looking to implement comment moderation on your platform, it isn’t enough to just rely on comment moderation tools. You need to form a cohesive strategy and comment moderation policy that aligns with your brand’s values. Here are some steps that you can take to get some ideas on a practical approach to comment moderation.

Plan for uncivil content with your comment moderation policy

Get your team together to predict possible responses to your content that might seem likely based on prevalent ideas and ongoing discussion about your topic. For example, if you cover a story on a political topic, expect supporters of the opposition to push their own beliefs and agenda. If your moderation team knows what to expect, they’re better prepared to handle the possible situations that may arise.

Comment moderation on Facebook as well as Instagram comment moderation are both meant to align with their terms of service, showing audience members that they’re consistent with their values. This can be a good starting place when looking to flesh out your comment moderation policy, since shaping your t comment moderation policy around your community guidelines also makes it easier for their audience to understand why your moderators take action against certain types of post and content.

Ensure your team knows your policy

Everyone on a ship needs to know how to sail, and everyone on your team involved in moderation and platform usage needs to know your comment moderation policy like the back of their hand.

Consider preparing a document with keywords or names that may indicate problematic topics that require extra attention. Take the time to go over the specifics, reasons, and practices of your comment moderation policy with anyone involved in the process, especially your moderators.

This will ensure that their actions and judgement remain consistent with your approach and the policy that you’ve put forward for your audience.

Enforce the comment moderation policy when necessary

Once you have the guidelines for comment moderation in place, you’ll need to prepare to enforce them. It’s not enough to put up the rules and expect that everyone will follow them; you’ll need to actively remove posts or edit them to align with your policies.

Remember that comment moderation should only be performed to steer the discussion towards safer spaces and remove outright harmful or toxic content that doesn’t serve much purpose. But you also shouldn’t be afraid to ban users outright when necessary; it’ll be much more beneficial for your customer acquisition and retention in the long run.

Still, depending on the scale of your platform, this can require a lot of manpower, which can be expensive and is based on the assumption that you can afford to hire the number of moderators needed.

Communicate and take breaks when necessary

Using communication software like Slack or Google Hangouts is a great way to keep your moderation team in touch and create a space where they can get support and depend on each other during busy times.

Your moderators can get clarification on topics they’re unsure about, and they can also feel more comfortable taking breaks knowing that the rest of the team can handle things in their absence.

These aspects of comment moderation are very important to keeping your team feeling empowered and supported, and it can help them work much more effectively to keep your comments free of any problems.

Conclusion

Comment moderation is an essential part of managing relations with your existing audience. It allows digital media brands to exert control over the type of content and discussion on their platform. But while comment moderation can easily be left to an automated system, it takes a structured, intentional approach to ensure that it functions successfully. Viafoura’s suite of tools is designed to promote community engagement and comes with comment moderation features that can easily be integrated and customized to suit your platform’s needs. Get in touch with us to schedule a demo and see how we can help you build a safe space for your community today!

The Facebook Page Moderation Feature: What Makes it so Flawed?

As one of the biggest social media platforms out there, Facebook boasts a record number of global users — over 2.6 billion of them — and there’s no doubt that number has gone up since then. A huge number of users means a huge need for effective moderation, and Facebook has placed moderative control on its users through the use of the Page Moderation tool — a feature that can be used by anyone to control the discussions, comments, and content posted on their platform.

However, there are some key flaws related to the Facebook Page Moderation feature that make it unreliable in the long run and ultimately tie into the overall flaws with Facebook’s content moderation system as a whole. Read on to learn more about these issues and why you should consider alternative options like Viafoura for your moderation needs.

Limited ad control

The Facebook Page Moderation feature covers the basics when it comes to managing the comments and replies that are made on your page or posts. It allows you to block specific words, implement a profanity filter, block specific users from posting entirely, and more. However, there’s only so much you can do with these features, and there are many issues that remain unaddressed.

For example, note that Facebook runs automated ads that are not filtered by the page moderation tool at all. You have zero control over the ads that are displayed on your page, and you also can’t run your own algorithms to better detect and remove unwanted content, meaning your settings aren’t stopping advertisers from presenting ads to your page viewers that you wouldn’t want associated with your page.

Filters have workarounds

Filters and blocklists are a simple way to moderate content on your page, but they’re only effective until a determined spammer or troll finds a hole in your defenses. Once they’ve found a workaround that isn’t being restricted by the Facebook comment moderation tool, nothing is stopping them from spreading toxic content apart from Facebook’s innate algorithms, which are notorious for misfires and failing to restrict negative content.

Another factor to consider is that while setting a filter and blocklist in Facebook works for text content, there is no way to moderate images and videos apart from deciding whether your visitors can post them or not. Visual content like shared pictures and videos are a huge part of engagement in social media, so restricting them can do more harm than good. But determined trolls and malicious users will often post images or videos containing their negative content that will fly right under the Facebook page moderation radar.

Facebook’s moderation algorithms need work

In a report published by Forbes, it was estimated that Facebook makes around 30,000 moderation mistakes per day. That number might not sound so big when compared to the number of users the social media platform has, but it’s still a huge margin of error when it comes to restricting the wrong user. There’s nothing more off-putting than getting flagged for a comment or reply that’s completely appropriate and relevant to the discussion, and Facebook as a platform still struggles to get this aspect of their moderation right.

As mentioned earlier, there’s no way to modify or customize the algorithms being used on Facebook, and you can’t run your own either. These factors, combined with the Facebook spam filter censoring safe comments and letting toxic ones through, means that it can be extremely difficult to drive lasting engagement through the social media platform alone.

Live moderation gets overwhelmed

Depending on individual needs, any user that seeks to moderate content on Facebook or otherwise will eventually realize that live moderators are still needed for more comprehensive content control. We’ve made amazing advances in our technology, but algorithms aren’t perfect. When some inappropriate content slips through the cracks, live moderators are the best way to make up for it.

While Facebook does employ live moderators, the sheer scale at which they operate means that it’s almost impossible for them to reliably cover all the bases. On top of all the regular censoring and removal of globally inappropriate material, there are local and cultural considerations that also require close review when moderating content, which can’t be done by algorithms and AI that simply blacklist Facebook users. This means that try as they might, Facebook’s live moderators are spread so thin that may never actually get to cleaning up toxicity off your page, which means you’ll have to do it yourself, using the limited functionality of the Facebook page moderation feature.

So what’s the solution?

Despite the many flaws of Facebook’s page moderation, it’s understandable why so many content producers and organizations rely on the platform. Like all social media platforms, Facebook does an amazing job at providing a space in which users can engage with one another. But what if you were to create that community space within your own platform?

Through the use of online community engagement and management software, content distributors can integrate the key elements of social media — the ability to comment, share, and discuss content with other users — as well as the functionality to effectively moderate and control the discourse around the platform. Once users start interacting within your own community space, you can fully control the algorithms used for moderation, activate and deactivate the features you want, and create a returning audience that contributes to the overall growth of your platform.

Viafoura provides robust community engagement and management software with several popular social media features that can be integrated right into your website. We also offer highly effective moderation services, from preset and customizable algorithms to live moderation services that focus on driving engagement while filtering out toxicity.

Learn more about our product suite by signing up for a demo, and start growing your online community today!