People who work as social media moderators, community managers, etc. are the ones who communicate with customers directly. It’s important that your brand has a unified voice, that all customer inquiries are answered, and that weekend crises are resolved. Although they are humans and just like the rest of us, sometimes they need a break. The right social media moderation tools can help a lot.
Why is social media moderation important?
First of all, social media moderation is often underrated. This is sarcastic. Community managers do not spend all of their work time on Facebook.
Well, not entirely. But before we delve into what a social media moderator does while they’re on Facebook (or Instagram and Twitter), let’s look at why exactly their job should be one of your brand’s priorities.
Social media moderation is not just “scrolling Facebook.” It’s also:
- Engaging in conversations with your audience
- Building relationships with your potential and existing customers
- Helping build consistent brand communication
- Increasing your brand reach and traffic to your website
- Encouraging customers to create user-generated content, one of the best ways to engage your audience
- Saving your brand reputation by reacting quickly to inappropriate content or angry customer complaints
- Playing a crucial part in your social media customer service and your overall customer experience
- Moving your customers through your sales funnel and often helping you actually sell your products and services.
Cat GIFs are not just a way to procrastinate; they are also a way to procrastinate while on vacation.
What does a social media content moderator really do?
Social media moderators do all of the above. But when we break it down into actual tasks, these will be, among others:
- Replying to comments from your customers – under your organic and sponsored content
- Replying to direct messages from people
- Deleting or hiding inappropriate content, competitors’ links, or abusive comments
- Keeping an eye on brand mentions on other social media profiles and reacting, if necessary
- Contacting the customer service team, product team, legal team, sales team – whoever can help answer a question that they themselves can’t
- Watching their mobile phones for notifications from their social media platform apps – usually not just during working hours, but late at night and on the weekends (and sometimes even on vacation)
- Which also means hardly ever putting their phone away
- Letting the team know when there’s a need for immediate reaction (a.k.a. a brand crisis on social media)
- And probably a lot more things you haven’t thought about.
Even though a lot of the things she has to do sound stressful, they can also be rewarding. Although social media moderation can be stress inducing, most people are not productive when they are stressed. Therefore, having a good social media moderation software can help make the job easier.
How can you improve social media moderation?
What can you and your team do to make social media moderation and community management easier and more productive? This allows you to save time and also gives your social media team some time off.
Track and reply to all comments in one dashboard
Managing social media without an supplemental tool, in particular if you’re in control of multiple profiles on several social media sites, can be difficult. This is not a good situation to be in. You will miss comments, or answer them late, work all the time and some more, and eventually, hate your job.
You don’t want to work a job you hate or employ someone who hates their job and has direct contact with your customer. Just think about it.
The Social Inbox is a social media comment moderation tool that prevents negative comments from being posted or helps you when negative comments have already been posted.
With the Inbox, you can:
- Have all comments from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube in one place, along with tweets and Twitter mentions, and direct messages from Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Twitter. Oh, and Google reviews. In one place.
- Reply to them from the same dashboard, without going to each profile separately, and save yourself many hours in a week.
- Hide and delete comments whenever necessary.
- Also, see all the comments that appear under your Facebook and Instagram ads – that you wouldn’t usually get notified about through the social platforms themselves.
They can more easily prioritize work, identify any emergency situations that need to be addressed first, remove troll comments and spam, and reply to all questions and messages. This could be a good way to reduce the anxious feeling in the morning of “what is it this time,” which all community managers are probably familiar with.
Automate social media moderation
Want to save even more time moderating your socials? Let’s look at some automated social media moderation solutions more closely.
Automatically reply to comments and messages (whenever appropriate)
The days when automation and social media seemed like opposites are gone. But the thing is to use automation wisely. One way to reduce social media conflict is to use Auto-moderation for some interactions.
You can use Auto-moderation to:
You can set up automatic responses for questions you get asked a lot in DMs or comments on Facebook and Instagram. What are some questions that customers might ask? Anything that people ask you about very often can be saved as a response to be given automatically.
The following text explains how to use Facebook and Instagram’s automatic moderation feature to prevent offensive content from being posted when there is no one available to monitor the page. This is especially useful for companies whose customers are located all over the world, as it allows them to avoid having to deal with offensive content posted while they are closed. You can set up an automated response letting your customer know that you are not available at the moment, but you will get back to them tomorrow. Also, provide them with your customer service team’s contact information for urgent situations.
Auto-moderation can be used to hide or delete comments with certain words or phrases that may be considered inappropriate content, such as profanities or spam. For example, you can delete all comments with links under your ads on Facebook and Instagram (which are often left by competitors).
This function works by setting up keywords that will automatically trigger a reaction or reply. You can create several different responses to various keywords or phrases, and the tool will automatically randomize them for you.
15 Social Media Moderation Software Solutions and Tools
1. Hootsuite
The Hootsuite app offers free moderation for social media users. Artificial intelligence software platform that provides real-time monitoring and automatic moderation. You can have all your profiles in one Smart Moderation account. This allows you to manage all of them from a single dashboard. It also lets you block unwanted users and spammers. Their software is very accurate, being used by leaders in publishing, such as TechCrunch and The Washington Post.
Key features/services include:
- Detection of inappropriate/illegal comment
- Supports Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
2. Pattr.io
Key features/services include:
- Text and image analysis (including emojis)
- Comment moderation powered by AI
- Unified inbox
- Data-driven insights
Trusted and loved by well-known global brands like Flight Centre and Lifeline, Pattr’s platform lets brands integrate
conversational artificial intelligence
(AI) seamlessly into their customer conversations to create better, more engaging experiences. One way it does that is by identifying unwanted content posted across your social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) empowering you to take relevant action. It offers integration with email and other third-party communication tools like Slack so you’ll be notified via the channel that you find the most convenient eliminating the need to change your existing workflows.
3. Juicer
This feature allows you to collect all your social media posts in one place so you can share them on your website. This allows you to choose and control the content that is displayed on your site. If you want to have more control, you can send all posts to moderation and then approve or reject them individually. If you want Juicer to moderate automatically, you can let it do that.
Key features/services include:
- A profanity blocker
- Duplicate post prevention
- Social media moderation filters to reject certain posts
- Content curation
Juicer is trusted by thousands of businesses of all sizes and their client list includes names like Lyft, McDonald’s, and Ralph Lauren. Included in all its paid plans is social media moderation and filtering functioning.
4. WebPurify
The three main tools they’ve created are a profanity filter, photo moderation tool, and video moderation tool. These three tools can be used to moderate photos and videos hosted online, including social media posts, avatars, product photos, and profile pictures, when integrated with a project that uses user-generated content (UGC). All live moderation is completed by their train in-house team. So, there’s a human touch.
Key features/services include:
- Profanity filter that supports 15 languages
- Photo and video moderation
- Offensive intent detection
WebPurify’s goal is twofold. They want to protect your users and, by doing so, protect your brand. They’re driven by their belief that everyone, especially children, need a safe experience when browsing social media and other websites.
5. Respondology
Mostly, it is used by consumer brands, like GoPro. Also, professional sport leagues use it too. They use AI filtering technology and human moderators to removenegative and abusive comments. Since most comments need to be looked at by a person, there is a team of over 1,000 moderators in the United States who do that job. In other words, the system will not only keep you well-protected, but will also be constantly improving its capabilities.
Plus, it’s discreet. All abusive comments are hidden from view, except for the person who posted the comment.
Key features/services include:
- Real-time data
- Keyword and emoji filtering
- Ability to add customized keywords
- Trend tracking and analysis
After spending 20+ years working in the digital sector, Respondology’s team decided to turn their skills to eliminating some of the bad that comes with social media. So, they made it their mission to create technology that will help to reduce the hateful content posted online like anti-LGBTQ comments.
6. Besedo
They spend their days moderating thousands of videos, images, and social media posts. Not only can their team moderate all types of content, but they can also moderate content in multiple languages.
This social media moderation solution uses both technology and human moderation. This means that you’ll have the best of both worlds.
Key features/services include:
- AI automation and manual automation
- Comprehensive filter management
- Nudity filters
Founded in 2002, Besedo has helped online businesses to create a safe experience for their clients that encourages customer loyalty. As you would expect from a company that’s been in business for two decades, they’ve managed to build an impressive client list that includes world-class brands like Change.org and Airtasker.
7. Amazon Rekognition
Key features/services include:
- Face detection and analysis
- Text in image detection
Amazon Rekognition’s API can be used to moderate social sites, blogs, photo-sharing platforms, and forums. It uses deep learning to identify any suggestive or explicit content like a rude sign in an image. Not only will it flag videos or images, but it will also create a hierarchical list with subcategories for better control. While you’ll still need some form of human moderation, it can reduce your workload by a lot and you’ll only have to review about only 5% of the total volume in the end.
8. ICUC
Key features/services include:
- Video and photo moderation
- Text moderation
- Contest moderation
Trusted by more than 250 international brands that include names like Unilever, Google, and Air Canada, ICUC is one of the leading (and oldest) names in social media community management and digital customer care. Whether you need help with simply strategizing or social media moderation, they serve a wide variety of industries including pharma, gaming, and automotive. With regards to their social media moderation services specifically, their team works round the clock in more than 50 languages across all social platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram) to help protect your brand’s reputation.
9. LiveWorld
They can take care of social media moderation for large-volume/multi-language brands. The software can help to manage a large amount of user-generated content on social media channels.
Key features/services include:
- Round-the-clock global coverage with 70 language/country combinations
- Engagement and response services
- Social customer experience
- Community monitoring and moderation
- Moderation and engagement reports
LiveWorld isn’t a software solution per se, but rather a digital agency that offers moderation services as part of their offering. It leverages both human beings based in the US and sophisticated technology to help protect brands and their customers 24/7/365.
Give your social media moderator a break (that’s more than a KitKat)
The best content moderation tool will make your employee’s job much easier, benefiting not only your employee but also your brand. Your employees are often the first people that customers will interact with when they encounter your brand. You owe it to them – and yourself.
If you are a social media moderator or community manager, congratulations! Send this article to your boss.
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