Social Media Content Moderation: Importance, Tools & Tips

Social media has become a ubiquitous platform for people to share their thoughts, opinions, and social experiences. Businesses also use these platforms for marketing and engagement purposes.

The open nature of social media allows users to post content freely, but this freedom can be abused by some who post inappropriate material.

Filtering offensive content is important to protect users from exposure to harmful or disturbing content, which can range from nudity to violence and sexually explicit material.

That’s where social media content moderation tools come in. They help you filter out unwanted and offensive content that would otherwise damage your brand reputation if it stays on social media for a long time. Read on to find out more about social content moderation and how you can use it in the best way possible.

What Is Social Media Content Moderation?

Social media content moderation includes the screening, reviewing, and filtering of content shared on social media platforms. This ensures that the content on social media about your brand aligns with your brand guidelines and supports your overall business goals.

Types Of Social Media Content Moderation

• User-only moderation: In user-only moderation, users themselves decide which content is appropriate or not. If a post is flagged multiple times, it's automatically hidden. This is a cost-effective way to moderate content.

• Automated moderation: In automated moderation, tools are used to analyze and review user-generated content. Predetermined rules guide the system to approve or reject content.

• Distributed moderation: In distributed moderation, community members review and discuss content to determine if it aligns with community guidelines. They then vote to keep or remove the content.

• Reactive moderation: Reactive moderation allows users to flag inappropriate content. This active involvement from the audience helps maintain a clean and appropriate online environment. Pre-moderation and post-moderation techniques are used alongside reactive moderation. A report button is automatically attached to each post that allows users to alert moderators of any offensive content.

In pre-moderation, content moderators review and approve content before it is published. The content is published first, and then moderators review it based on user flags or automated detection of potentially harmful content in post-moderation.

Why Moderate Socia Media Content?

Protect Brand Reputation

All strong bio user-generated content may not align with your brand's message or campaigns. Employing skilled content moderators can minimize the exposure to irrelevant or inappropriate content, safeguarding the brand's image for genuine visitors.

Identify Real Users

Content moderation provides data on user behavior and opinions, allowing businesses to understand their needs and requirements. It also helps eliminate fake user profiles, reviews, or product testimonials, ensuring genuine interactions.

Curbe Inappropriate Content

Social media is widely used, but some users post inappropriate content, including pornography, fake news, and malicious images. Quality content moderation prevents such content from being circulated.

Boost Social Sales With Quality Content

Using authentic user-generated content is an excellent way to show your brand's offerings, as it's perceived as more credible and reliable by your audience. By curating and filtering this content, you can improve your customers' shopping experience across social media channels, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Transforming user-generated content into shoppable and sellable formats further amplifies its impact. This approach appeals to both existing and potential customers' emotions, thus influencing their purchasing decisions. Ultimately, this strategy strengthens brand affinity, drives conversions, and boosts revenue.

Use User-Generated Content For Growth

Use user-generated content to collect customer feedback and testimonials. Engage potential customers with enticing offers and show their positive experiences across your brand's physical locations to improve authenticity and credibility.

Leverage user-generated content on social media displays to build a strong, long-lasting relationship with your audience. This approach drives conversion rates and boosts sales and revenue.

Secure Your User-Generated Content

Social media moderation tools allow brands to filter and repurpose user-generated content while adhering to brand guidelines. Once suitable content is identified, brands can seek permission from the original creators to use it across their social media channels and websites. Attributing the content to its creators enhances authenticity and eliminates legal concerns.

Boost Website Traffic

Leverage social media's engaging and compelling user-generated content to enhance your brand's authenticity and website content. Social media moderation helps filter out inappropriate content before it reaches your website or social media feeds, ensuring that your audience enjoys a positive and engaging online experience.

How Can Social Media Content Be Moderated?

Take Legal Guidance & Educate Your Team

Given the evolving nature of online content posting guidelines, it's crucial to stay informed about the latest legal and technical aspects. Ensure your social media moderators are up-to-date on current regulations and can effectively identify and address potential issues like discrimination or defamation.

While diverse opinions and open conversations enrich social media interactions, it's important to manage these discussions responsibly. Disabling posting altogether may not be the best solution. Instead, focus on filtering out inappropriate content. Remember, your audience's comments and feedback about your posted content drive brand growth and popularity. Just be sure to keep the trolls at bay.

Provide Feedback & Educate Author

When removing user-generated content, provide an explanation to the author and cite relevant guidelines or rules. This transparency helps build understanding and helps prevent future violations.

Avoid deleting any content without justification, as this can create a negative perception of your brand and motives. Equip moderators with a list outlining acceptable reasons for removing content from social media. Allow moderators to select the appropriate reason and share it with the author for transparency.

Source: DigitBin

Highlight Valuable Content

Encourage your audience to like or dislike content to identify valuable contributions. Implement mechanisms to make positive content more visible, reward contributors, and build a constructive discussion environment.

Studies show that users spend significant time on social media, with mobile users accounting for the majority of that time. Use this engagement to encourage valuable comments and feedback on your brand's content, which is like a free resource that can significantly benefit your brand.

Hire A Community Manager To Oversee Online Content

Assign a community manager to monitor and engage with your audience’s content around your brand across social media platforms. This dedicated person will safeguard your brand's reputation and encourage audience participation, ultimately driving brand growth.

Learn more: Top 7 Community Management Software

Establish Clear Guidelines

Publish clear guidelines for your audience to build an online community that aligns with your brand's values. Emphasize that offensive language is prohibited and outline other unacceptable behaviors. These guidelines serve as the foundation for successful social media content moderation.

Create concise and easy-to-understand guidelines for your commenters. Keep the moderation procedures straightforward and to the point.

Use Keyword Filters

Use keyword filtering systems, commonly offered by social media platforms, to block posts containing specific keywords and offensive words from appearing publicly on social platforms.

Top Tips For Improving Social Media Content Moderation

24/7 Content Reviews And Management

Social media is an always-on platform, demanding constant content reviews and management. A single lapse in monitoring leads to a rapid spread of harmful or false information, potentially damaging your brand's integrity and customer trust. As MIT professor Sinan Aral observed, "falsehood diffuses significantly faster than truth," so it’s crucial to safeguard your customers' interests. This requires round-the-clock screening and approval of user-generated content, adhering to strict guidelines.

Fraud Prevention and Abuse Detection

A blend of human judgment and cutting-edge automation is the key to preventing fraud and protecting your brand from harmful content on social media. This requires meticulous screening of all user-generated content to avoid system vulnerabilities. Automated abuse detection rules should flag new content for further review. Machine learning can be used to generate data sets and models to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Profile Impersonation Detection

The prevalence of fake accounts, emails, and domains highlight social media's lack of regulation in balancing free speech with preventing the spread of misinformation. To safeguard against this threat, profile impersonation detection is essential, and a combination of human oversight and AI proves to be the most effective approach here. Advanced analytics can filter out obvious fake accounts before they reach customers, while human intervention is necessary for more subtle violations.

Social Media Content Moderation Tools

Sightengine

Sightengine is a cloud-based content moderation API that uses AI and ML to detect and filter various types of harmful or offensive content from social media platforms. It caters to businesses, organizations, and individuals looking to maintain a safe, inclusive, and compliant online environment.

Key Features

• Image Moderation: Identifies and filters inappropriate or illegal content in images, including violence, hate symbols, and gore.
• Video Moderation: Detects and flags objectionable content in videos, such as violence and hate speech.
• Text Moderation: Analyzes and filters text-based content for offensive language, hate speech, bullying, and other harmful expressions.
• Audio Moderation: Transcribes and analyzes audio content to identify profanity, hate speech, and other inappropriate language.
• Live Stream Moderation: Monitors and flags potentially harmful content in live streams to allow real-time intervention.

WebPurify

WebPurify is a social media content moderation tool that helps businesses keep their user-generated content UGC clean and safe. It uses a combination of automated and live moderation to detect and remove offensive content. WebPurify also offers a profanity filter that detects offensive intent, even if the words themselves are not offensive.

Key Features

• Automated moderation: WebPurify's AI moderation system automatically detects and removes offensive content from your UGC.
• Live moderation: WebPurify offers a live moderation service where human moderators review flagged content and make a decision about whether to remove it or not.
• Profanity filter: WebPurify's profanity filter detects offensive intent, even if the words themselves are not offensive. This helps you to catch content that is intended to be offensive, even if it does not use explicit language.
• Customizable moderation rules: WebPurify allows you to customize your moderation rules to fit your specific needs. You can choose which types of content you want to moderate, and you can set different thresholds for each type of content.

Battle Unwanted Content With Social Media Moderation!

Social media platforms have dedicated teams in place to monitor and remove inappropriate content before it reaches users. However, the sheer volume of content posted every minute makes this task difficult.

Social media moderation tools step in to assist users by swiftly and effectively removing inappropriate content. These tools help to respond to brand conversations quickly, monitor spam content, analyze social media campaign performance, and maintain a positive online presence.

But you should also be careful about comments under your social content. They should also be moderated if you wish to increase your CTR. That’s where comment moderation tools like Statusbrew come in, which moderate comments not just under your organic post but also under your paid ads.

With Statusbrew, you can easily:

• Monitor social media comments from different profiles in one place
• Filter comments by sentiment, keyword, or other criteria
• Respond to comments quickly and easily
• Hide or delete inappropriate comments
• Track your comment moderation performance over time

Statusbrew helps you to easily manage your social media comments and ensure that your brand is always seen in the best light.

Book a FREE demo today to understand how Statusbrew can help you to prevent your brand reputation from being damaged!

Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.