These days it’s unusual for a company not to have some element of social media attached to it’s business.  Whether its comments from users on their site, or a Facebook or Twitter account, social is here to stay.  But how do we ensure quality over social?  After we fling open the doors to anyone with internet access, how do we control that piece of our site without stifling creative and productive conversation?

Enter moderation.  The term is commonly used, and often tacked to the bottom of someone’s already long to-do list.  Moderation can mean different things to different people, but we’re here to give you some insight into what it should mean, and provide some basic best practices for how it can be done effectively and efficiently.

The foundation of moderation is a clear, a complete set of Community Guidelines that are readily available to and easily seen by users.  Tell them what is permissible and what is not.  State what will result in disciplinary action.  Encourage users to respect the community rules and each other. Finally, enforce the guidelines in a speedy and consistent manner.

In a perfect world, your users themselves and their actions are going to be one of the key parts of your moderation process.  You want them to feel enough ownership over your community that they’ll keep an eye out for unsavory behavior, trolls, bots, and other undesirable behavior and will take action accordingly.  For more insight on how to get your community involved check out our whitepaper, “Managing Anonymous Community Participation”.

Once you have a community that is actively helping you keep an eye out for abuse, you need to make sure that items and users reported as abusive are dealt with, quickly and consistently.  The reasons for speed are twofold.  Having unsavory or annoying content within your community will annoy your quality users and derail otherwise great conversations. If you want those quality users to stay and grow with you, make sure you’re keeping a happy, healthy environment for them to spend time. Without quick and consistent action, troublesome users, bots and other undesirables will see your site as a great place to call home.  Trolls and other negative users will drive out loyal users and prevent new ones from joining. Recovering after this scenario happens can be challenging. 

The effort involved in moderation will obviously depend on the size of your site and the amount of activity associated with it.  If you can support moderation in-house and have a dedicated part-time or full-time resource, then this is definitely a viable solution. If you or your team don’t have bandwidth to commit to daily moderation work or need help in the off hours, it’s time to consider a third-party solution like the one we are now offering.

Third-party moderation does not have to be pricey.  It will, however, give you whatever coverage you need and want, allow for scalability, and give your team the ability to focus on growing the community and the site. Although this might result in even more content to moderate, that is exactly the kind of problem you want to have.