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Online Community Manager: Job Description, Jobs & Salaries

The digital world we live in has changed the way people interact with companies and how they make purchases. Now, with the spreading influence of online communities and their increasing role in building a brand identity, building a brand’s reputation and awareness online is a must these days, including social media and organic presence, among many other things.

Companies need a savvy online community manager to help build a reputation as a community-based brand and engage with their audience. In addition, an online community manager can help build trust, position a brand, and improve user engagement. Think about it as a role that creates a bridge between a brand and its customers. They act as a moderator that serves as a spokesperson for the brand and communicates intent between them.

What Does An Online Community Manager Do?

A community manager is a person who usually is working closely with the Digital Marketing department. They are responsible for ensuring all the content follows the set guidelines and expanding the brand’s online community. This usually means they will also be in charge of implementing the digital engagement strategies. It is important for a community manager to understand what sets a community apart from an ordinary audience online.

The good thing about this position is that it requires skills that you can gain through different degrees. This means that it doesn’t matter whether you are a journalist or a public relations specialist – as long as you meet the requirements, you can apply to and find success in this position.

But before you start sending your resume to different companies, take a look at the online community manager job description.

Online Community Manager Job Description

An online community manager is responsible for building, growing, nurturing, and managing online communities. This role entails performing community management around a specific brand or purpose.

Online Community Manager vs. Social Media Manager

Even though the tasks of an online community manager and social media manager are similar, these are two different positions. The critical difference between the online community manager job and social media manager job is how they interact with the audience.

While the former is responsible for communicating as a brand, promoting products and services, an online community manager is responsible for the entire holistic brand strategy in the digital landscape.

As such, while these roles may end up merging depending on the company you work for, they carry different responsibilities. However, their core responsibility remains engaging an online community to its fullest potential.

Tasks of an Online Community Manager

Here are some of the basic tasks that an online community manager is responsible for carrying out. Bear in mind that the list of functions is not exhaustive.

Managing a community

Online community managers are responsible for fostering a sense of community around a brand by actively engaging with the audience. As part of their tasks, community managers need to monitor the user engagement level, set community guidelines and perform additional tasks such as identifying influencers in the industry for possible collaboration purposes. In other words, the community managers main job is to optimize the companies digital community for success.

Engage with users directly

One of the responsibilities of an online community manager is looking for loyal followers who like the brand and engage with them. They can do this by leaving comments on their posts or answering their questions on the official profile. Community managers are also able to elevate the quality of online discussions, as well as sustain meaningful relationships with the audience. Real conversations with the audience can turn into a catalyst for growth in your publications. If you want to learn more you can watch this Webinar: How CBC Creates Real Conversations Below the Fold

Solving problems

If you have built an online community for your brand with clear guidelines, problems will sometimes still occur between members. A community manager will have to declare the final word on issues and take action in case of broken policies. However, a community manager can take advantage of automatic tools such as content moderation platforms that allow the software to perform moderation with oversight from the community manager.

Managing social media

Online community managers need to stay ahead of the competition on social media, looking out for trends within the industry. Further, an online community manager needs to deal with the press and any legal issues regarding the brand’s image online.

Maintaining optimal performance and accuracy of content

Online community managers are also involved in publishing content on the site and driving organic traffic. Therefore, they need to make sure that all the information displayed on the site is relevant and up-to-date and double-check that there are no discrepancies between the website, social media platforms, and the blog in terms of information.

Online Community Manager Salary

The average online community manager’s salary is $44,214. However, if you are an entry-level candidate, you’ll need to expect a lower remuneration starting at $35,000.

Online Community Manager Jobs

Whenever proceeding down a career path, it’s crucial to evaluate future opportunities, which means investigating potential opportunities to grow within the industry.

If you start as an Online Community Manager, you have the option of progressing to a Marketing Manager or Content Strategist with time. However, you can also choose to specialize in online platforms and work as a Digital Marketing Manager. Once you have sufficient experience and knowledge within these roles, you may one day qualify for the role of a Social Media Director.

How to Increase Website Engagement: 5 Ideas Included

As Generation Z and Millennials make increasing contributions to global shopping trends, it only makes sense that they are driving the online shopping revolution. With more than 2 billion people making their purchases online, it’s loud and clear that the web is the place to be for global companies.

However, with the abundance of online products and services, modern companies need to find a way to stand out amongst the thousands of websites. It’s easy for your web platform to fall into obscurity if you aren’t engaging with visitors to your website and converting them to loyal subscribers.

If you’re wondering if optimizing site engagement is necessary when you already have good website traffic, we can assure you that it definitely is! Website engagement is critical since it’s the key to converting visiting traffic into members of your online community.

This article will discuss some fundamental audience engagement concepts and how you can incorporate them into your web platform and foster a growing online presence.

What Is Site Engagement?

Website engagement is the process of building relationships with your customers to create a community around your brand, which you can then interact and participate in to foster trust and brand loyalty . An engaged audience is more likely to continue to use your products and services, and is more likely to share your brand within their communal circles, which helps attract more like-minded people to your site.

You can build relationships with your customers on the site through different methods. Below are some key links between your brand and your customers that have a lot of influence on web engagement.

Content

Web content is the backbone of the material that your community will read over, discuss, comment on, and share. This means it’s vital that you provide content that is interesting, relevant, and as close to what your audience wants as possible. These can be updated on specific programs, new products or services available for your audience, community spotlights, and more.

It’s also important to provide content at a steady, reliable pace, as this is a big part of what makes your audience revisit your website and increases overall web engagement. In addition, this lays the foundation for the establishment of a community within which your users can feel included.

Social-media style features

Social media is popular for a good reason; they utilize several popular functions and tools to foster community engagement. Using social media style features such as likes and follows, comments, community posts, news feeds, and engagement carousels are a great way to get your community involved in your brand and creating a buzz about what you have to offer.

Through use of an online community engagement and management software, you can employ many of the tools we’ve mentioned to increase community engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about these features, check them out here to learn more about how to use them within your own web platform.

Active participation

In addition to providing tools for your audience to engage with your content and their fellow members, it’s also important to note that as a brand, your contributions to the community’s growth are just as important, if not more, than those of your users. Your audience wants to know that you care about their opinions, and that you’re willing to directly engage with them regarding their praise, feedback, complaints, and contributions.

Make sure to assign someone to manage your community and engage with them regularly, if not daily, and regularly go over the audience engagement data to examine what your community has to say about your brand.

Website Engagement Analytics

Now that you understand what web engagement is, you need to know how to process the data you receive from your platform to adjust and modify your engagement strategy.

Some of the metrics that you can check regularly include page views, time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, and new visitors. These can be easily accessible via Google Analytics, and it is strongly recommended and if you’re not already doing so, to utilize this tool to analyze data and make informed decisions on how to continue to promote site engagement.

How To Increase Website Engagement

This section will talk about five effective tips that you can use to increase your site engagement. This is not a comprehensive list, but it will go a long way towards resolving any major complications that are proving to be a roadblock for your web engagement.

Faster page loading

Let’s say you are looking for something on Google. What happens if the page you click on takes a long time to load? Chances are, you are going to bounce back and select another result. This is definitely something you want to avoid; your website should load in two to three seconds as a rule of thumb. If that’s not the case, then you are potentially losing traffic and chances at community growth.

There are numerous ways to improve the loading time of your website, such as image compression, combining files, avoiding redirects and reducing HTTPS requests. Talk to your web designer/programmer to discuss how you can optimize page load speeds to ensure your web traffic successfully reaches your platform.

Simplify your navigation

Your users need to reach any part of your website within two to three clicks to increase web engagement. Therefore, you should create an easy structure for them to navigate; in this regard, many people focus on internal linking. This is how you direct the users from one part of your site to the other. You can do this using images, CTAs, and even navigation links embedded in your content. Make sure that you are linking to other pages on your site in a natural way to provide value for your customers and help them find similar content to what they’re interested in seeing.

Mobile friendly

Today, most web users prefer using mobile devices to browse the web and engage with the web platforms. This means that it is vital that your website be properly optimized for mobile users.

There are several steps to creating a mobile-friendly website, such as format optimization, making navigation easy through the internal linking strategy we explained above, and testing if everything is in order through Google’s mobile-friendly test. Any issues outlined need to be addressed by your web developer.

Adding chatbox

Providing a chatbox service can be a great way for users to get the answers to frequently asked questions and narrow down where they need to be to find content. Using a live chatbox service is a great way to increase audience engagement by having users communicate with your brand’s reps directly through your platform. Having one of these on your site is one of the most powerful website engagement tools.

Guide users

Guiding your users can help your online engagement while achieving conversions at the same time. Here, you will need to use different CTAs (call-to-action) that are persuasive while avoiding direct commands. For instance, instead of a button that says “Buy Now,” use words such as “Subscribe” and “Learn More.” As a result, users are less pressured to decide and won’t feel that they need to commit to your brand right away. This also does wonders for fostering trust and a sense of community because the user feels valued as an individual and not a sales figure. It is key to regularly go over key engagement tool metrics in order to keep up to date with the current state of your sites online engagement.

Study your audience

Your audience are living, breathing people, with their own individual tastes and preferences. There’s a lot of information you can obtain from them when they visit your website, and you can put that information to good use by customizing their experience with you when they return from time to time. Using tools like Google Analytics can be a great way to visualize your audience’s behaviours, and on a personal level, using cookie data to suggest content similar to their previous choices allows for simple personalization that makes it much more likely that they remain engaged with your brand and website.

We hope this has been useful in helping you come up with your own website engagement strategies. We also recommend you check out our webinar on a new approach to engagement and our suite of online community management solutions to learn more about how they can help you construct your virtual community and increase overall site engagement for your organization.

How To Build An Online Community

Businesses face an ever-expanding digital consumer market, and it’s important to adapt to this shift in user preferences and respond with the provision of a well-designed, web-based platform that offers a unique and customized customer experience. The key to success lies in establishing a reliable web presence that inspires trust, loyalty, and a sense of community around your brand, which makes it extremely important to know how to build an online community for yourself.

There are a lot of benefits that come with building an online community; an increased ROI, a base of loyal customers, and a surge in brand awareness. Regardless of the industry, brand, or market sector, well-built virtual platforms that can sustain a growing, engaged community are a tremendous asset to your business and should be highly prioritized within your marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll go over what an online community is and examples of the various types, how to build an online community, and some of the best practices for when you’ve put together your own.

What is An Online Community

An online community revolves around bringing people together around a specific concept, subject, or purpose. Depending on your organizational goals and the digital platform you choose, your users could share their opinions about a topic, go over educational resources, and even collaborate on projects.

So when you decide to build an online community, the first thing you have to consider is its purpose. To help you sort this out, here are some examples of online communities modeled around specific goals.

Interest-based community

As you might have guessed, these communities form around shared interests, hobbies, or pursuits. These are usually formed around recreational activities, and people in these communities are passionate about its basis. For instance, book clubs, wine tasters, coffee blend aficionados and sports fans are all great examples of this type of community.

Geographic location-based community

It is common to see these communities formed in small neighborhoods or towns. They’re usually built around a sense of neighbourhood, and often involve posting updates on the happenings around the neighbourhood, ranging from information regarding community projects, the best places to eat, and public service announcements.

Profession-based community

Some online communities are dedicated to connecting people that work in the same industries to share tips, solve problems, and find work. These groups share similar experiences in their work life, and their members can understand the unique challenges or circumstances that come with the profession, which can make them particularly well-knit at times.

Learning-based community

These types of communities are very common, and its members are brought together after they subscribe to a course or purchase a membership for an instructional or educational program. Some examples of this include communities built around continuing education courses, language study, and vocational training. These communities benefit from exchanging information, knowledge, and study materials with their peers.

Brand-based community

These types of communities are the most relevant to business, retailers, and media brands looking to engage with their customer audience. They’re specifically built around the user’s shared experiences with a particular brand, and are usually fostered by feelings of satisfaction, loyalty, and pride that are a result of a great customer experience.

How To Create An Online Community?

Now that you’re aware of the benefits of creating an online community and how it can benefit both your brand and your audience, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to build an online community for your brand.

1. Choose the platform and outline your goals

As we mentioned before, the first thing you need to do is determine your brand goals and the purpose of the online community. This will probably align closely with your business goals, and will ultimately shape the way you engage with your audience and increase the appeal of your community.

2. Create guidelines

If you are going to build an online community, then you need to determine a set of rules to regulate the behavior of your members. Remember that you want to avoid any harassment, spam content, and illegal posts, and generally want to create a positive, brand-focused environment that makes your users excited about your content. Make these guidelines clear and readily available, and have systems and tools in place to enforce them when necessary.

3. Set up the community

Review some of the key features needed when figuring out how to create an online community. Ensure all the basics of user personalization are in-place, and make sure the tools your audience has access to for community engagement are functioning as intended. Ensure your content is separated by categories and tags so users can easily find the information they are looking for. Finally, also make sure your sign-in process is clear and bug-free so users can build their identities without issue.

4. Strategic engagement and community growth

A big part of engagement is input from your side as the brand. Engaging with your community by asking questions or proposing topics to discuss offers new sources of discussion, and your presence within the community will show your users that you’re taking an active, forward-facing role in its growth. Use the tools your audience does to promote discourse; like favorable posts, post comments and responses to questions, address complaints promptly and transparently. These are all great ways to develop community trust and growth.

Best Practices When Looking To Build An Online Community:

When it comes to building an online community, there are no shortcuts. Having an audience engagement strategy is the first step towards establishing a meaningful connection with your customers. Below are some of the best practices to keep in mind when creating your strategy for an online community.

Be Personable

The key to building a thriving digital community is by focusing on audience engagement. By nature, human beings want to connect and talk about things that matter to them, such as current events, their interests, or hobbies. Expressing what your organization stands for and infusing your brand’s unique perspective into your content can help connect with audience members who share the same views. This is the first step to building a lasting relationship with the members of your online community. Take the time you need to actively communicate with your audience and participate in the discourse, and you’ll see fantastic results in return.

Get to Know Your Audience

Providing an engaging digital space for your audience to engage and interact in requires both a keen understanding of community essentials as well as web elements and software. If you don’t have either of these, that’s okay!

At Viafoura, we offer an end-to-end platform that can help you engage with your web audience and convert them into members of a community. Our customizable and scalable solutions can help you convert first time visitors and unknown audiences into loyal subscribers. Check out our unique suite of solutions here to learn more about the ways in which online community management and engagement software can help you provide a unique experience for your audience.

Take Advantage of Tools

Building a community online comes with a number of responsibilities that can get daunting if you don’t utilize specialized tools. Connecting your social media tools to your online community platform can also be a challenge.

At Viafoura, we offer an end-to-end platform that can help you engage with your community and convert them into leads. Our customizable and scalable solution can help you uncover loyal subscribers and turn them into your brand’s ambassadors. Check out our unique platform here.

Grupo Clarín Upgrades Its Audience Engagement Solution With Viafoura

In pursuit of a new community-building partner, Grupo Clarín enlists the help of Viafoura to develop a highly active and lucrative digital audience.

TORONTO, ON, Jul. 21, 2021 — Grupo Clarín, the largest media producer in Argentina and one of the top Spanish news brands worldwide, and Viafoura, a leader in audience engagement and content moderation, today announced an ongoing partnership to forge stronger, long-lasting audience relationships. Replacing its previous audience engagement tool, Grupo Clarín is embracing Viafoura to improve user experiences on its website — and ultimately drive registrations and subscriptions.

Before turning to Viafoura, Grupo Clarín did not have an effective way to moderate Spanish conversations on its digital properties. Viafoura’s advanced moderation capabilities allow Grupo Clarin’s main sites clarin.com (News) and ole.com.ar (Sports) to automatically block up to 90% of offensive comments, facilitating positive and productive conversations.

By combining Viafoura’s AI-driven, multilingual moderation services with its social engagement tools, Grupo Clarín is starting to see the quality of on-site discussions improve.

“We were looking for more than a basic commenting platform; we needed a solution that could consistently drive civil engagement and loyalty on-site,” explained Marcelo Rizzi, Chief Technology Officer and Big Data at Grupo Clarín. “We liked how Viafoura could bring an intuitive social experience right to our websites, with real-time engagement features such as likes, shares, personalization and notifications.”

“At the end of the day, we chose Viafoura because of its superior functionality, business model and price,” Rizzi added.

“Viafoura’s Audience Engagement Suite is designed to add value across digital communities, boosting user engagement and brand loyalty,” stated Jesse Moeinifar, Viafoura’s founder and CEO. “With Viafoura, Grupo Clarín can continue to inject new growth opportunities into its business.”

About Viafoura

Viafoura partners with over 600 media brands to engage, convert and monetize their digital audiences. With best-in-class engagement and content moderation solutions — including real-time conversations, live blogs, community chat, personalization tools and AI-powered moderation — Viafoura helps companies create active, civil and loyal online communities. Advanced data analytics also offer customers access to unique and valuable insights into their audience’s behaviors and preferences. As a result, the Viafoura solution drives higher registrations and subscriptions as well as better-targeted content and advertising.

About Grupo Clarín

Grupo Clarín is the largest media company in Argentina and a leading company in printing, publishing, broadcasting and programming markets. Its flagship newspaper — Diario Clarín — is one of the highest circulation newspapers in Latin America. Grupo Clarín is the largest producer of media content in Argentina, including news, sports and entertainment and reaches substantially all segments of the Argentine population in terms of wealth, geography and age.

Clarín actualiza su solución de comentarios con Viafoura para mejorar la experiencia e interacción de sus usuarios

En la búsqueda de un nuevo socio de ‘community-building’, Grupo Clarín contrató los servicios de Viafoura para desarrollar una audiencia digital altamente activa y valiosa.

TORONTO, ON, 21 de julio, 2021 — Grupo Clarín, la empresa de medios más grande de la Argentina y una de las marcas líder de noticias en español a nivel mundial, y Viafoura, compañía líder en interacción de audiencias y moderación de contenido, anunciaron hoy una alianza para crear lazos más fuertes y duraderos con sus usuarios. Reemplazando su herramienta previa de interacción de audiencias, Grupo Clarín se une a Viafoura con el objeto de mejorar la experiencia de los usuarios en sus sitios web, y como consecuencia continuar creciendo en registros y suscripciones.

Antes de contactar a Viafoura, Grupo Clarín no contaba con una manera eficaz de moderar las conversaciones en sus propiedades digitales. Las tecnología de moderación utilizada por Viafoura le permiten ahora a los sitios principales del Grupo Clarin – clarin.com (Noticias) y ole.com.ar (Deportes)- bloquear automáticamente hasta el 90% de los comentarios ofensivos, facilitando de este modo las conversaciones positivas e interesantes.

Al combinar los servicios multilingües impulsados por la inteligencia artificial de Viafoura, con sus herramientas de interacción social, Grupo Clarín confirma cómo la calidad de las conversaciones de sus sitios mejora.

“Estábamos en la búsqueda de algo más que una plataforma básica de comentarios; necesitábamos una solución que pudiese manejar en forma consistente la interacción amable y la fidelidad en el sitio”, explicó Marcelo Rizzi, Chief Technology Officer and Big Data en el Grupo Clarín. “Nos pareció atractivo cómo Viafoura podía aportar una experiencia social intuitiva directamente a nuestros sitios web, con características de interacción en tiempo real, tales como ‘me gusta’, ‘compartir’, ‘personalización’ y ‘notificaciones’.”

“Al final del día, elegimos Viafoura debido a su funcionalidad superior, modelo de negocios y su valor”, agregó Rizzi.

“El paquete de interacción de audiencia de Viafoura está diseñado para agregar valor a las comunidades digitales, promoviendo la interacción de los usuarios y la fidelización del cliente a la marca”, anunció Jesse Moeinifar, fundador y CEO de Viafoura. “Con Viafoura, Grupo Clarín puede continuar inyectando nuevas oportunidades de crecimiento en sus negocios.”

Acerca de Viafoura

Viafoura se encuentra aliada a más de 600 Medios con el fin de interactuar, convertir y monetizar sus audiencias digitales. Contando con las mejores soluciones de interacción y moderación de contenido del mercado, incluyendo conversaciones en tiempo real, blogs en vivo, community chat, herramientas de personalización y moderación impulsadas mediante IA, Viafoura ayuda a las empresas a crear comunidades online leales, amigables y activas. Un análisis de datos avanzado, también ofrece a los clientes acceso a información única y valiosa acerca de los comportamientos y las preferencias de sus audiencias. Como resultado, la solución de Viafoura impulsa un mayor número de registros y suscripciones, así como también ayuda a que la publicidad y el contenido estén mejor dirigidos.

Acerca de Grupo Clarín

Grupo Clarín es la compañía de medios más grande de la Argentina y una empresa líder en los mercados de impresión, publicación, transmisión y programación. Su diario emblemático, el Diario Clarín, es uno de los diarios de mayor alcance en América Latina y llega sustancialmente a todos los segmentos de la población en términos de nivel socio-económico, geografía y edad.

The Independent Selects Viafoura To Foster Civil Discussion Across its Global Brands

The Independent is the latest publisher to replace its legacy commenting solution with Viafoura’s industry-leading suite of engagement tools to gain reader insights, build trust and create a more civil and interactive community

TORONTO, April 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — To support the continued emphasis on civil discourse and journalistic integrity, the leading UK publisher, The Independent, has selected the Viafoura audience engagement solution to build and nurture the reader communities of its premier global news sites, including The Independent, Evening Standard, Indy100 and Independent Español.

Viafoura’s digital experience platform enables publishers to go beyond commenting, and gain insight through actionable first-party data allowing companies to better understand their audiences. The Independent can deliver more personalized content experiences and marketing initiatives through Viafoura’s real-time conversations, live chat, content recommendations and personalized notifications.

The Independent selected Viafoura’s solution because of its ability to integrate the entire content creation and consumption cycle while also fostering civil discourse. The Independent has already seen an increase in civility, fewer articles getting flagged and reduced customer service complaints thanks to Viafoura’s AI-powered moderation service, advanced engagement and first-party data analytics. For example, Viafoura’s AI platform can detect if the term “snowflake” is being used in a benign way — in the context of a discussion of weather — or as an insult in a political discussion.

“We didn’t want to simply replace our old platform with a similar one; we were looking for game-changing technology that could improve reader engagement and provide us with a suite of features to help us build our communities and Viafoura gave us that,” said Jo Holdaway, Chief Data & Marketing Officer at The Independent. “By integrating the key moderation features with human interactions from launch, we are able to provide our journalists and community members a safe space where they can share their insight and opinions. The next phases of the roll-out will be based on the solid foundation of positive conversations.”

The Independent identified a need to own its visitor experience and other solutions were not able to integrate that experience across its platform like Viafoura. Publishers are quickly realizing that it is imperative to own their platforms and data so that they can provide a better and more personalized user experience.

“Viafoura lets publishers put reader engagement at the forefront of the relationship,” Viafoura CEO Jesse Moeinifar said. “For a news organization like The Independent, which has built its reputation on decades of quality and thorough journalism, having a platform that streamlines the cycle of discourse is crucial. Whether it is AI-powered moderation or delivering a truly customized experience through first-party data integration, publishers are able to utilize Viafoura to further the relationship between information source and the communities they serve.”

The Independent joins other major publishers such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Graham Media and Reach PLC who can engage their communities and deliver better content through actionable insights. To improve your community’s experience, please visit viafoura.com.

About Viafoura

About The Independent

The Independent has been at the frontline of journalism since its launch in 1986, with its mission to challenge and debate always ahead of its time. It is Britain’s biggest quality digital news brand and top 10 in the US. Publishing from 12 countries and in six languages The Independent is a truly global news organisation. Since The Independent became the UK’s first digital-only national newspaper in 2016, the brand continues to invest in and deliver high quality and trusted journalism while building out its data-driven products, services, audiences, and international presence.

All the Different Types of Moderation for Your Digital Properties

Updated June 22, 2020.

With trolls and toxicity running wild all over the internet, moderation has become practically mandatory for any publisher hoping to build and engage a profitable community.

Nearly 50% of Americans who have experienced incivility online completely remove themselves from the situation. Which means, if you allow toxicity to go unchecked on your properties, half of your audience is likely to abandon your platform if they see anything offensive.

Not to mention that Google’s starting to ban media companies with toxic comments around their content from its Ads platform. ZeroHedge, for instance, was recently banned for allowing offensive and false information to exist on its website. The Federalist also received a warning that it would be banned for the same reason if protective actions aren’t taken.

In a joint statement with other big tech companies, Google explained that it will be focusing on “helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about [COVID-19], elevating authoritative content… around the world.”

Google’s global move to tighten moderation restrictions on media content comes after several countries, like France and Australia, began challenging the tech giant’s dominance over media.

If you want to keep your environment protected, moderating user interactions will help your visitors feel safe enough to engage in conversations and build relationships on your platform.

But while many engagement tool vendors claim to use fancy moderation algorithms, most of them are nothing more than ban-word lists. To protect the environment on your platform so users actually want to return, you’ll need to go beyond a simple ban-word list.

Instead, sift through the different forms of moderation so you can select a tool that will best support your community guidelines.

From more traditional user self-policing and manual moderation, to fully automated and full-service approaches, we’ve broken down the different types of moderation to help you understand what will work best for your business.

User-to-User Moderation

You know how on social media, you have the option to flag or report anything that distresses you so moderators can review? Well that’s what user-to-user moderation is — users monitoring and reporting other users for bad behavior.

As an extra layer of protection, consider giving your community the power to flag offensive or concerning posts that may slip through the cracks. Facebook moderation has some flaws and gaps when it comes to moderation, which is why you need a complete, specialized platform like Viafoura.

To minimize the amount of user-to-user moderation needed on your property, it’s important to have strong community guidelines. Read the best practices for creating community guidelines here.

Human Moderation

Moderation is an extremely complex topic that can be broken down into different forms. But here’s the problem: many publishers think that human moderation — where people manually go through users’ posts and block any offensive ones — is the only kind of moderation.

Human moderation is incredibly time-consuming and expensive on its own. Publishers who can’t afford to hire external human moderators and don’t have the time for it in-house tend to give up on building an engaged community altogether.

Sound familiar?

Consider this: when paired with an automatic solution, the need for human moderation is minimized, reducing associated time and cost investments.

The great part about human moderation is that humans are able to catch harassment or incivility that can’t always be picked up by existing algorithms as they learn. So instead of having humans do all of the work, reduce their moderation scope to focus on what technology can’t catch or understand on its own.

Read more about human vs machine moderation here: Human vs. Machine: The Moderation Wars

Automatic Moderation

Forget simple ban-word lists. A truly effective automated moderation solution should instantly prevent the majority of toxic posts from being posted from the very second a user submits a comment.

Intelligent automatic moderation lightens the workload for human moderators by minimizing the number of comments pushed to humans, allowing them to focus on truly questionable posts, or those that are flagged by other users.

Quick tip: Many service providers claim to have AI or automatic moderation, but don’t actually leverage natural language processing or machine learning to understand variations of words and sentence structures. Check in with your moderation provider to make sure your tool can learn as moderators approve or block comments, further training the algorithm, which should be customized to your guidelines.

Intelligent Auto Moderation of Live Chat

Full-Service Moderation

What’s a publisher to do when they just don’t have enough time on their hands to worry about moderation?

Answer: Outsource the complete solution to a service provider.

Choose a vendor that can bundle a cost-effective package for you, which should include human, sophisticated automatic and user-to-user moderation services to get the best bang for your buck.

Remember, folks: a protected community is a happy community. And that translates to revenue growth.

Hungry for more knowledge on moderation? Check out seven tips that will help your moderation team survive a national election.

Five Simple and Subtle Ways to Recommend Content to Your Audience

When it comes to the media industry, content recommendation goes far beyond newsletters. Companies are beginning to recognize that, when done strategically, recommending content to audiences can amplify consumer interest and enhance their overall experience with brands.

But here’s the big question: what recommendation methods are most effective?

Last year, Gartner, an international research firm, revealed that 78% of consumers crave custom experiences. The report goes on to explain that while consumers want an effortless and relevant experience, they don’t want their personal information to be abused.

This means that it’s important to recommend content from your platform in a subtle and data-secure way. Otherwise, you risk appearing self-serving or annoying to your audience. Just think of how much trust Facebook lost thanks to its history of abusing user data.

Send the right content to consumers without overstepping boundaries by relying on a mix of personalized and automated tools and techniques. We’ve rounded up some simple ways to get started, which will keep consumers on your digital properties for longer — without sacrificing any part of their experience.

Push Notifications

If you’re on the hunt for a way to boost time spent on your digital property, push notifications may be the solution your organization needs. You can allow users to customize their own experience by limiting notifications to their favourite topics and verticals that they’ve opted into.

Research from the Columbia Journalism Review found that consumers are generally comfortable with receiving push notifications. As a result, companies are successfully leveraging this technology to keep audiences interested in content.

New York Magazine, for instance, has seen a 7% click-through rate on mobile push notifications for its shopping vertical, and plans to increase notification frequency around other verticals. Viafoura clients have also seen click-through rates of up to 27.6% on push notifications.

Overall, push notifications are a quick and effective way to connect directly with your audience members for urgent or new content.

Ratings and Reviews

Have you ever wondered how you can best flag top content to consumers without ever lifting a finger? Rating and review tools allow audience members to publish their own authentic feelings about your content.

These community-made recommendations are often perceived by consumers to be significantly trustworthy.

In fact, “92% of consumers trust peer recommendations,” says a marketing expert on G2.

These tools also give consumers an additional avenue to engage with your platform, flagging top content as they generate conversation.

Data-Driven Recommendation Widgets

If you’ve ever subscribed to a video-streaming platform, you’ve probably noticed the recommended content that changes as you watch new videos.

Content-recommendation widgets run algorithms that analyze user data and automatically choose what media consumers see. In most cases, these tools help companies provide a highly relevant experience to consumers.

“Data-driven personalisation… ensures customers get what they want,” reads an article on SportsPro.

These personalization tools aren’t limited to the OTT space, and can be leveraged by any media company that hosts content on their digital properties.

As a matter of fact, all types of companies that buy into personalization tech are surpassing their competitors by 30% in sales.

Trending Conversations

Comment readers earn up to six times the engagement than ordinary consumers.

For this reason, you may want to consider putting a tool in place to keep these extremely valuable community members interested in your platform.

Certain tools are actually able to highlight trending conversations across your properties, allowing you to keep your most active audience members reading your most engaging content.

Personalized Messages

Gartner explains how “brands find themselves balancing the need for personalized marketing messages while consumers are increasingly concerned about privacy and data usage.”

To keep consumers engaged and satisfied on digital properties, companies are now relying on their first-party data to understand consumer behaviors. With these resulting insights, companies are able to send relevant, personalized messages to subscribers. Custom messages can be used to suggest a curated list of must-read content based on the particular interests of each consumer.

Many companies send out these types of personalized messages to users who are becoming inactive, allowing them to re-engaging audience members and prevent churn.

No matter how abundant or great your content is, the right people aren’t necessarily finding it. Maximize the time users spend on your digital properties by giving them a gentle push in the right direction.

13 questions every publisher should ask a potential tech partner

Choosing a new technological service provider is no easy feat for any employee in the media industry. From third-party tools that extend the reach of your content to tools that offer state-of-the-art analytics, there are countless forms of helpful technology that could, theoretically, help your company grow in revenue and success.

“Though direct ROI is an important consideration, there are a lot of activities that are crucial to the health of a media organization that may not be direct revenue drivers, but that generate value that indirectly yields revenue,” states a recent report by Publishing Executive, a company that provides publishers with industry insights. “Efforts related to content creation, management, and distribution, user experience, and audience engagement deliver value to publishers’ products, if not always immediate revenue.”

With so many potential tech partners to sift through — many of which offer similar tools, with the most minute differences — how can you possibly make a proper decision in the limited amount of time that you can spare?

In Publishing Executive’s new report, data suggests that one of the main challenges publishers face when selecting new technology is that they don’t have enough time or resources to actually go through the product-selection process in depth. The publication suggests that the “solution may be to build more of a structured evaluation process for new tech in order to streamline and accelerate awareness, evaluation, and decision-making.”

To help save you time and guide you down the path to success, we’ve rounded up the key questions you should be asking a potential tech partner before you go ahead and seal the deal.

1. What impact on my business’ ROI will this tool have, and is it easy to measure?

One of the first steps to purchasing software for your company should involve digging into exactly how much you can expect to get out of it. Whether that means 3x the revenue, number of members or any other metric will depend largely on what your business is trying to achieve.

Odds are, a vendor will ask you about your KPIs and reader revenue strategy to find out how they can best answer your question. So if you’re going to meet with a tech vendor, make sure to have a basic understanding of where your business stands, and where it plans to go.

A successful tech partner also needs to be able to provide you with enough data from the tool so that you can accurately measure its profitability. If you don’t have a way to measure their tools’ success, how can you know whether or not your benefiting from it?

2. What operating systems and devices does the app work on?

It’s 2019, and that means if your platform isn’t completely responsive to suit any device, your users’ experience is going to suffer.

According to Pew Research Center, out of the Earth’s 7.53 billion residents, around 5 billion of them own a smartphone. So before you sign on with any tech partner, ensure their system can be seamlessly integrated with your website, and is friendly to all available operating systems and devices.

After all, the last thing you want to do is turn away all the visitors who choose to access your platform via mobile device.

3. Can you customize the solution to make it look and feel like our brand?

An industry expert on The Drum explains that “consistency is key in building familiarity with your customers, which leads to understanding and trust. Customers will not trust a brand that offers a fragmented brand experience.”

Something as simple as changing the font type and color on any integration or embedded tool so it adheres to your brand’s design guidelines can make a world of difference to your users.

4. How does your solution increase reader revenue and build a reader’s loyalty, recency and frequency?

We get it, every single software company is just dying to improve your user’s experience, and help push them to subscribe to your publication. But do you have a good understanding of how their tools work and influence the visitor’s journey to subscribe?

Before you jump the gun, be sure to investigate the direct impact any new tech will have on your users’ journey. If your vendor can help you better understand how they can boost your users’ engagement and subscriptions, it might be worth testing out.

5. What resources do I need to bring this product to life?

Think beyond the cost of a product and have the vendor outline exactly what it will take to integrate and implement it on your owned and operated properties.

“Time – not budget — is #1 obstacle to tech adoption: Publishers are price conscious, but price is not the top concern when making a technology investment,” explains Publishing Executive.

Ensure you have a thorough understanding of what you need to do on your end for the setup process, and how long it will take to implement the tool, from proposal to launch.

6. How often are you updating your system and do we get the updates for free?

When you sign on with a tech partner, they will most definitely run system updates from time to time so they can improve your experience with their software.

While regular updates shouldn’t be cause for worry, you do want to make sure they have an effective process in place to support you should you run into any issues or bugs. Plus, check to see if the system updates would be applied to your company free of charge or at an additional cost.

Fun fact: Often times, companies will throw a 10% price increase at the time of your contract’s renewal to cover updates. So remember to ask about it ahead of time so there are no surprises along the way.

7. What kinds of support do you offer?

Each software provider will have its own unique support services. At Viafoura, for instance, we offer data analysis services on top of our standard tools to help our partners draw insights from first-party data.

If you require a product and a specific service or guidance, it’s better to kill two birds with one stone by picking a single service provider that can appease all of your product-related needs.

8. How does your business model work?

The best business models of a tech partner are geared towards growing as your organization grows.

These types of vendors are typically able to scale their offerings to your organization’s size.

9. What makes you unique from your competitors?

This one’s an obvious one, but still can’t be stressed enough. The best tech partners know why they’re the best, and should, therefore, be more than able to communicate what sets them apart from everyone else clearly and concisely.

10. How, and in what forms, can data be exported from the system? Who owns the data?

In a publisher’s world, audience data equals revenue. The more data you can pull from your audience, the more conversion-related insights you’ll be able to take away and use to improve your conversion strategy.

Check in with your vendor to determine whether or not they can give you valuable audience data as your community interacts with their tech on a regular basis.

11. Do you provide client references throughout the sales process?

If you’re seriously considering signing with a tech publisher, don’t be afraid to request their client references. Book a short 10 or 15-minute call with their references to discuss what the client’s experience has been like in working with the vendor, and how their business has benefited from their services.

If you feel like a client is no longer interested in the service, it may be a red flag. It’s also a great way to find out any implementation challenges that a vendor may not be completely honest about.

12. What are the different ways you handle moderation?

When it comes to technology that involves user interaction, moderation is a must-have piece of the solution. Without it, you can expect trolls and toxic posts to destroy the quality and safe environment of your platform.

Ask the vendor you’re chatting with about what kind of moderation technology they’re leveraging, if any, to give your users the best experience they can possibly have.

13. How user-friendly are your engagement tools?

There is a direct relationship between your users and your revenue. A better user experience encourages users to return to your platform, interact more with your content and, eventually, subscribe. Which is why any front-end tech tools you invest in need to provide your users with a flawless and intuitive experience.

If you’re short on time, this checklist is a quick way for you to get started in the product-evaluation process. You’re welcome.