Small businesses that are looking to scale need to have an effective social media presence. It’s more than simply being available on a platform — especially if your followers or subscribers don’t feel like they’re connected to you in any way.

Nowadays, building and maintaining a relationship with your company/brand and its followers requires the right mix of teamwork and time. Moderating content that’s posted by others on your social media channels is really difficult — especially when you maintain a presence on more than one platform, so protecting your corporate image in that way can be difficult.

Being able to sift through content made by genuine customers on social media and spam/hate speech is increasingly becoming an essential part of social media management. However, a lot of businesses do not have the manpower to do this, especially during busy periods like weekends and the holidays, no matter the time zone.

Outsourcing your content moderation

It’s true that content moderation is much harder than it looks.

The recent spike in Fake News is the biggest proof of the fact that even large platforms like Facebook and Twitter struggle with content moderation. Every business does the best that it can to maintain a good public image, but it can still be susceptible to trolls and PR disasters. The comment section of a business’ social media page is a thriving hotbed of discussion, but some of that content needs a second glance.This is exactly where content moderation comes in. However, what gets moderated is the real issue.

Facebook itself as a platform has been moderating content posted on the site since 2008, to ensure that said content is in line with its terms of use, however, even when comments are fair according to Facebook’s Community Standards, they can still largely be damaging for a business. When in the throes of a viral onslaught, moderating content can be almost impossible for an in-house team to achieve, which is when outsourcing your content moderation comes into play. However, there is a misconception that things have to go wrong before calling for reinforcements.

How exactly does content moderation work?

A lot of customers don’t want to feel like their right to free speech is being infringed upon, ergo the frustration with a notification like, “your comment is under moderation” after posting a message. Content moderation completely rids you of this dilemma, because a third-party provider monitors your company’s community in real-time while allowing them to freely share what they want.

There are various types of content moderation, i.e.

1. Comment moderation, and
2. Image moderation

Comment moderation

When someone mentioned content moderation, this is typically what comes to mind. Through this form of content moderation, your community’s comments are moderated in real time.

Comment moderation varies, however, there are three main types, namely, compliance moderation, internal moderation and finally automated moderation.

1. Compliance moderation

This type of moderation ensures that all customer-generated content submitted to your social media, or community management platforms, comply with your site’s policies and terms of service. It prevents your business from having any sort of downtime, especially where eCommerce customers are concerned.

2. Internal moderation

This form of comment moderation tags the comments that are generated by your customers in real-time and labels them for the appropriate team members to follow-up, i.e sales, tech support, customer service, etc.

3. Automated moderation

Using software, customer-generated comments are automatically detected and then put through a system which filters these comments looking for banned keywords for review. This form of moderation actually reduces the amount of content that requires moderation, because when a certain keyword is flagged, it’s automatically taken care of.

Image moderation

Whether you’re running a community site or an eCommerce site which accepts customer product images, real-time image moderation is a boon which allows you to protect your company’s reputation, while taking advantage of content diversity.

What to look for when outsourcing image moderation?

1. An Efficient User Interface (UI)

The UI should allow moderators to review as much content as possible per hour and quickly accept or reject images at a low cost to you and your company.

2. Quick Turn-Around Quality Control

The moderators should be regularly tested in order to optimize their turn-around time. You should also ensure they’re well versed in your company’s policies, as well as the terms of service related to quickly removing content in direct violation of said policies.

Nowadays, user and customer-generated content is an essential element in building brand recognition and rapport. Most customers actually trust content created by other customers more than traditional content produced by businesses and the media.

In order to take advantage of this content without losing your brand’s values and overall message, someone has to step in and allow you to access the data which will help your business to gain a better understanding of its customer in the long-term.

High-volume campaigns create a plethora of content which when indexed allows your business to create and recognize patterns, thereby turning that data into something with can be actionable and inform your businesses strategy.

Content moderation is an essential part of marketing because it improves your business’ SEO (search engine optimization). When customers and users generate content on your website, social media, or create product reviews on other channels, this content will attract more traffic to your brand and create many more unique searches for your brand, thereby improving your company’s overall SEO ranking.

One thing that is abundantly clear is that content moderation does more than simply protect your brand and mitigate PR disasters. It is also an essential part of your customer experience (CX). Outsourcing content moderation moves you from taking a risk to actively creating a content strategy which is completely unique to your brand and your company.

For instance, after running a social media campaign in order to determine how customers used its mouthwash, Listerine was completely surprised to find out that some customers used it to treat fungi on the feet.

That’s the great part of content moderation. It moves your customers and user from the passenger’s seat and actively into a position of being able to jointly determine the fate of your company with you.

Remember, content moderation not only helps you gain a better insight into how your customers feel about your company, products and services, but it’s also an essential part of the overall customer experience.‍