Why And How To Moderate Your Social Media Community?

A good brand, when engaged in a good social media strategy, ensures an active social media community too. Building a social media community promotes engagement and increases the brand’s visibility. In addition, it is an effective way of attracting potential customers. A good social media community can be built by interacting with customers and creating engaging content that like-minded people like. However, once the social media community increases in size, it becomes important to moderate the community. 
Reasons To Moderate Your Social Media Community
Even though it is recommended that your social media community should have a free voice to express their opinion, it is important to moderate it. The primary reason for it is that their comment will impact the future prospects of the brand. Imagine posting Sexy Photos on your Instagram page to promote a clothing brand and receiving negative comments on it! With social media moderation, you can ensure that the engagement of the community lies within the boundary. Posting inappropriate and inadmissible content should be taken care of seriously. 

Further, social media community moderation is a must to ensure that there is no misinformation circling around your brand. Further, the comments that your posts receive will impact the buying decision of future clients. Potential customers do check the comment section to check whether your brand and its product are reliable or not. 

Receiving comments from the members on Instagram Stories or WhatsApp Status is not a problem. It is because these comments usually go under direct messages. However, this is not the case when a comment can be read by all. Not to forget that your brand association depends upon the community that it is surrounded by. Hate speech and discrimination might put your brand in a bad spot. Therefore, it is important to keep your social media community in check with moderation constantly. 
How To Moderate Your Social Media Community?
The easiest way of moderating a social media community is by publishing clear guidelines for the commenters. Facebook now allows the group admins to have a set of guidelines that the members have to agree to before joining the group. Such guidelines ensure that your community members can enjoy a safe online environment. In your guideline, you can clearly mention the commenters to be polite. 

Secondly, bring in a community manager to keep a check on the activities which are taking place across different social media channels. Handling a social media account can prove to be a herculean task for a person. Therefore, it is best to divide the responsibilities to ensure efficiency. If a social media platform supports pre-moderation, go for it. With pre-moderation, you can ensure that a post is visible only after it is approved. This tactic can be extremely helpful in protecting the brand’s image. 

Further, educate your employees about harassing comments. Once a member identifies a harassing comment, ban the commenter straight away. Further, if you see an inappropriate comment on a post, delete it as quickly as you can. A dedicated social media monitor can make this task extremely easier. 

The social media community should have a platform to express their opinions respectfully. However, when you moderate your social media community, you need to understand what is appropriate and what is not clear. For instance, if a member of your social media community leaves harsh but true feedback on your product, do not delete the comment. Deleting such comments will again create a bad image of your brand. Learn to take such criticism, acknowledge it and work towards finding a solution. Always keep the door of communication open for the community members. 

Also, many social media management tools make it extremely easy to monitor this social media community. With such a tool, you can keep an eye on all the comments on a single platform. Further, the user receives an update whenever there is a mention of the brand. 

Moderating your social media community is absolutely essential for maintaining your brand image and growing it further in the future. However, before applying all the methods described above, work on a proper guideline which can serve as a base for applying these. Once you have the baseline ready, working on the required tactic to moderate the social media community becomes easier.