Monitoring vs Moderation: 5 Tips for Being Social Media Smart
We all know that social media allows customers to be heard loud and clear. But evaluating and engaging these opinions can both protect brands and build trust with their customers.
Monitoring and moderating are important tools that can help brands understand their online presence. These two words are often used interchangeably, even though they are actually pretty different from each other. So, to clear up any confusion, let’s start with their quick definitions:
Monitoring vs Moderation
Social media monitoring is all about listening. It means listening to public social media sites where content is not controlled and keeping a pulse on what’s going on within your brand, employees, competitors and industry.
Listening is still a big part of social media moderation, but it also means escalating and responding to content on company-owned and controlled sites, such as Facebook pages and community forums.
Let’s Talk Best Practices
No matter which industry you’re in, there are some common best practices that should be kept in mind when it comes to monitoring and moderating your social channels:
Listen Up: Listening is the first step to assessing the overall sentiment of your brand. By actively observing current conversations, dispositioning categories and triaging interactions, it becomes easier to develop objectives, strategies and policies such as response action plans and escalation workflows.
Stay Positive: A positive social community is a well-moderated one. This means working with your customer care partner to develop training that builds strong, scalable moderators who have the confidence to manage negative and sensitive content.
Front Line = Bottom Line: With news hitting social channels first, your front line team should be ensuring appropriate people are notified when critical situations occur. This allows other departments (IT, Legal, Marketing, etc) to proactively plan responses if needed.
For brands who have a large number of monthly interactions, a common tactic is to review new social media cases in a FIFO (First In, First Out) basis. Cases are tagged with the appropriate disposition code, and any critical cases are then escalated to the appropriate team.
Create Connections: Positive or negative, feedback on social channels always provides opportunity to drive customer loyalty and retention. Working with your customer care partner to develop consistent responses and response times will always enhance the customer’s online experience.
Real Time: Social media has instant sharing capability and content spreads quickly. This is why moderation should be done in real-time, reviewing and reacting to content within seconds, 24 hours a day.
Let’s say you’re a global brand with an annual Superbowl ad. It’s a good idea to have a team moderating reactions during the game, providing real-time responses to every positive and negative post, YouTube reaction video or Reddit thread. They can then escalate anything that needs a second set of eyes as soon as possible.
The Total Package
When it comes to monitoring and moderating social channels, every company’s ultimate goal should be to enhance customer experience and advocacy, while minimizing potential harm to the brand. That’s why it’s so important to choose a customer care partner who can provide you with the total package – the right technology platforms to fit your needs, response best practices and extensive social reporting to help you understand how it all fits together.