registered user Archives

Civilize & Monetize: How to Highlight Constructive vs. Toxic Comments

Spotlight:

A moderation strategy keeps your digital spaces safe, but should also include how to drive positive conversations
Positive, active communities are lucrative for publishers
1. 80% of all user registrations are triggered on pages that feature onsite engagement tools and user-generated content.
2. Registered users spend 225% more time-consuming media content per week.*
  1. *Viafoura study data collected Jan 2019 – May 2019, sampled 14 unique media brands, sampled 85M unique non-registered and 2.5M registered users
Help spark the conversation, pose thoughtful questions
Highlight positive community members, not only does it encourage more engagement, it shows the kind of engagement you’re looking for
Community guidelines must be clear and easily accessible to your community

Online social spaces exist to build value for your community members, generating engagement and loyalty toward your brand. And these tools are most effective when media organizations support them with the right strategies that maximize user activity.

A moderation strategy, for example, is necessary for businesses to keep their digital social spaces civil. But media companies must go beyond reducing offensive comments and trolls in their social spaces to facilitate ideal behavior from audience members.

“Just as it’s important to have a strategy in place to protect the quality of your on-site social spaces, it’s also crucial to have a strategy to drive positive conversation around your content,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation solutions at Viafoura.

In other words, if you want to drive positive behavior from your community members, you’ll need to take action by encouraging users to participate in meaningful, on-topic discussions.

The Value of Activating Productive Discussion

In the digital world, active communities are incredibly lucrative for media companies.

You can draw on your users’ engagement and behavioral data to personalize their experience and increase your website or app’s appeal to advertisers. Plus, you can assess what people post about to determine the types of content that will resonate the most with your online community.

Keep in mind that digital conversation tools also connect people together, forming long-lasting relationships that are tied to your brand.

But you can’t assume that people will become active, model community members unless they understand what kind of discussions and behaviors are expected of them.

Media organizations that take the time to outline and promote what positive behavior looks like for their communities will be well-positioned to grow attention levels, memberships and various revenue streams.

“The most thriving and profitable online communities are often the ones where positive behavior is encouraged, demonstrated and rewarded by the community host,” Adams explains. “No matter how intuitive and engaging your moderation tools are, you need to develop a battle plan if you want to activate your community effectively.”

Ultimately, media organizations can take a few simple steps to ensure their communities are overflowing with activity:

Pose Questions for Users To Answer

If you want to increase activity from your digital community, you can spark discussions and debates by showcasing thought-provoking questions.

“One of the best ways to keep discussions in your commenting section buzzing and on-topic is to give your readers a prompt through a question that relates to your content,” Adams states. “Not everyone will understand how you want them to behave if you don’t give them some level of guidance to follow.”

Consider highlighting questions for community members at the bottom of your content piece. Or, you can pin them as posts within your commenting widget.

Interacting with your community members, even by just getting a conversation started, will give users the direction they need to post comments that are on-topic and positive.

Reward and Highlight Model Behavior

Your community members play a significant role in the success of your business. So how are you taking the time to reward your most active users?

“By rewarding commenters for positive and productive contributions, you’re incentivizing your most loyal supporters to continue participating in your digital community,” says Adams.

There are several ways you can show readers that you appreciate good behavior.

You can give top contributors badges based on their participation levels, pin their comments to the top of your commenting widget, invite them to help you moderate live events and send them an email to thank them.

Set Up Clear, Accessible Community Guidelines

Your community guidelines essentially act as a blueprint for acceptable and positive behavior on your website or app.

According to Adams, you should be direct in your community guidelines — tell your audience exactly what’s expected of their behavior on your digital properties. That includes outlining what kind of behavior isn’t appropriate.

Adams suggests “your guidelines should make it clear that comments that appear legally objectionable or [encourage/condone] a criminal offense or any form of violence or harassment, will NOT be tolerated.”

Crafting clear community guidelines posted in an easy-to-access spot on your digital property will pave the way for acceptable behavior and positive conversations.

Media organizations must implement strategies to outline, reward, highlight and facilitate positive behavior in their online communities. By doing so, companies can benefit from a closely connected, active and growing audience that can be monetized continuously.

For more information on how to build positive behavior in your community, view a list of community-building best practices here.

The Different Ways You Can Monetize Your Audience

If you take a good look around the media industry, you may notice something — social media and other big tech companies are no longer dependable revenue sources. This is the time to break away from mainstream advertising tactics and, instead, begin investing in your own digital properties and audience… before it’s too late.

Ultimately, those who control how users are engaging with their platforms will be most likely to survive in the long run.

Forbes even reports that there’s a “direct and proven correlation between the level of customer engagement and business profitability.”

Profitability starts with consumer engagement. Unfortunately, there are still many media organizations that have yet to tap directly into user engagement-related revenue. Look below for a breakdown of the simple ways you can monetize your engaged audience on your own platform.

Use Conversation Tools

People who read comments represent your most engaged audience. With 10% of a platform’s total attention time originating from comments, it’s easy to understand why live conversation widgets are so valuable to media companies.

And yet, many media players hold negative perceptions about these types of interactive tools. Individuals tend to see conversation tools as a way to tolerate discussion that’s been riddled by trolls, bots and harassment. But in reality, conversation tools that are properly moderated can be a goldmine for user engagement and, therefore, revenue.

Conversation tools that use advanced moderation systems also ensure that the quality of discussion between audience members is high.

Take your conversation tools to the next level by embedding ads between comments. A quick and easy way to boost your company’s earnings is to embed cheap advertisements into these spaces on high-performing content pages.

“When we think about monetizing the comment area, it’s a way to isolate your most engaged audience and put ads in front of them,” says Dan Seaman, product director of engagement tools at Viafoura.

Link Engagement Tools to Your Registration System

In addition to hosting live conversations, there’s a whole slew of user engagement tools that can help you maximize and monetize time spent on your digital properties. For instance, you may choose to use content recommendation tools, live chats or real-time blogging tools to keep your users interested in your offerings.

Once you’ve selected which engagement tools best suit your business’ needs, we highly recommend that they be connected to your member or subscriber registration system.

Your audience engagement tools and paywall provider should be able to work together to send registration messages to highly engaged users. They should also be able to alert you when a subscriber’s engagement drops and they may be about to churn.

Implementing separate engagement and registration systems doesn’t mean that consumer dollars will start pouring in. To effectively monetize your audience, your systems must work together to build engagement and send paywall messages to your most interested consumers when they’re ready to subscribe.

As the CEO of The New York Times puts it: “people don’t want things to be free, they want them to be easy.”

Create Subscription-Only Experiences

Many media companies like Hearst and Time are planning to run subscriber-only, ‘premium’ experiences to connect with their paying audiences on a deeper level.

“So much of brand-building now is around community,” Thomas Ordahl, the chief strategy officer at a brand consulting company, tells Digiday. “The question is whether you can take all of the equity and then wrap other types of offers and services and benefits around it that become sources of revenue.”

Whether your company relies on digital subscriber-only events (like an exclusive Q&A with a celebrity) or in-person experiences (like meetups with popular journalists), subscription-based experiences can help convince your consumers to pay. Some companies even reserve their engagement tools for subscribers.

Collect User Data

First-party user data is the gift that keeps on giving to media companies. Not only does it allow businesses to learn more about audience members and serve them relevant content, it also improves the ability to advertise to users.

This means that gathering insights on your audience will make your digital property more appealing to other advertisers. Forget running your own advertisements on social media, where you have little control over your content and revenue.

“First-party data becomes the new currency and advertisers know where to buy the media at scale,” states Amit Kotecha, the marketing director at a publisher data company.

In general, the best way to monetize your audience is to make the most of user interactions on your own digital properties. The more opportunities you can give consumers to engage with your brand, the better.

You Got a Registered User, Now What?

Conjure up an effective plan to keep your registered users interested and active in your community.

If you’re reading this, odds are yet another user registered to access your on-site engagement tools and content. While that’s wonderful news, don’t celebrate just yet.

With third-party cookies crumbling due to data privacy regulations and browser limitations, the valuable data you get from a registered user is climbing. But here’s the catch: you need users to do more than just register for your services. You need them to stay active and profitable on your platform.

Our data scientists have found that registered users — who are engaged regularly on platforms through social experiences — generate five times the return visits per week compared to non-registered users.

So what’s the holdup? Conjure up an effective plan to keep your registered users interested and active in your community. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve crafted a list of the necessary next steps below.

1. Educate Them

While your registered users may have access to a premium experience, they may not be aware of all the bells and whistles held within your platform. For this reason, it’s important to go out of your way to teach them about all the great features and services that can enhance their experiences, even after registering.

As part of the Globe and Mail’s user onboarding process, education is a critical piece of the revenue-generating puzzle. More specifically, their five-step onboarding plan includes educating the end user on all features and services available.

Want to increase awareness around your own platform’s content? Consider using on-site engagement tools to push notifications about new content to your users. Enable email or desktop notifications to encourage return visits, allowing your users to stay up to date with your latest and greatest pieces.

If knowledge is power, the ability to control your users’ knowledge is a superpower.

2. Continue to Engage Them

Just because someone registers for your on-site engagement tools and content doesn’t mean that they’re loyal to your brand. In order to earn their loyalty, you need to continuously engage them throughout their entire lifetime as a registrant, and even afterwards.

Use tools like live conversations, community chats, real-time blogging and ratings and reviews to create a socially immersive experience for your registered users. These social opportunities will spark loyal habits in your community, where they return to your site regularly. Everybody wins.

“Based on a number of academic and business studies, we know that frequency of visits — one measure of loyalty — is correlated with a propensity to buy or renew a subscription, and it drives your advertising business,” says International News Media Associations researcher, Grzegorz Piechota.

So put the proper engagement tools in place to entice users to return to your platform frequently.

3. Track Them

84% of consumers want to be treated like actual people during their online experiences, not just another number on a dashboard. In other words, users want brands to cater to their individual needs.

But how can you know how to cater to each user if you don’t have a good understanding of their unique behaviors?

Here’s a quick tip: study their patterns as they move across your site so you can personalize their experience.

Dig in to your on-site engagement tool metrics to understand what topics and content your registered users are gravitating towards. Based on your findings, you can customize their experience by serving up highly relevant content.

“It’s clear that the way to win customers is through cohesive and authentic interactions,” states an article on Ad Age. “That means the entire experience has to be fueled by data.”

4. Encourage Paid Subscriptions

For many organizations, a registered user doesn’t necessarily translate to a paid subscriber. You may have users who have registered just to use your on-site engagement tools. Although that may not be your endgame, it is a step in the right direction: towards a paid subscription.

For those of you who are aiming to boost paid subscriptions within your platform, highlight exactly why a paid subscription is valuable. Take it a step further by enhancing your conversion strategy. This involves targeting highly engaged users with personalized subscription offers.

As you track the behavior of your registered users, ensure that your engagement tool vendor is keeping an eye out for drops in engagement. You vendor should be able to notify your paywall provider of disengaged registrants, who can then send them special offers to remain engaged and to subscribe.

Now go ahead and transform your ordinary registered user into a loyal, profitable community member. The sustainable community you’ve always dreamed of is but a few steps away.