How can you customize moderation tools for your brand voice in social media management?

1 Why customize moderation tools?

Moderation tools can help you save time, protect your brand image, and foster a healthy and respectful community. However, if you use them without customization, you might end up blocking or removing comments that are actually valuable, relevant, or constructive for your brand. For example, you might want to allow some criticism or feedback that can help you improve your products or services, or you might want to encourage some humor or sarcasm that can make your brand more relatable or human. On the other hand, you might want to avoid some words or phrases that are offensive, spammy, or misleading for your brand. Therefore, you need to customize your moderation tools to match your brand voice, tone, and personality.

2 How to define your brand voice?

Before customizing your moderation tools, it's important to define your brand voice. This is the way you communicate with your audience, and it should reflect your values, mission, and identity. To do this, consider questions such as: what are the main goals and messages of your brand? What are its values and beliefs? What are its characteristics and traits? How do you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand? What words or phrases do you use or avoid in communication? To help organize these answers, consider using a brand voice chart or matrix to create a consistent and clear brand voice.

3 How to customize moderation settings?

Once you have defined your brand voice, you can customize your moderation settings according to your preferences and needs. Depending on the platform and tool you use, you can choose from different options such as blacklisting or whitelisting words or phrases, using sentiment analysis to assign comments a score based on their positivity or negativity, and assigning different roles and permissions to users based on their behavior, loyalty, or engagement. For example, you could block profanity, hate speech, competitors' names, or highlight keywords, hashtags, or compliments that are relevant for your brand. Additionally, you can set a threshold that hides or deletes comments that have a low sentiment score, or reward comments that have a high sentiment score. You could also give more privileges to your fans, influencers, or advocates and restrict or ban users who are trolls, spammers, or harassers.

4 How to customize moderation responses?

Customizing moderation tools includes customizing your moderation responses, which are the messages you send to users when moderating their comments. These should be in line with your brand voice and tone, as well as respectful, polite, and helpful. To customize your moderation responses, you can create templates for common moderation scenarios and use placeholders for user names, comment content, or the reason for moderation. Furthermore, emojis, gifs, or stickers can add emotion or humor to your responses. You can also personalize the messages by using the user's name, mentioning their previous interactions, or giving them feedback or advice. A signature or sign-off can show your identity or personality. Moreover, you can test and measure the effectiveness of your moderation responses by tracking metrics such as user satisfaction, retention, engagement, or sentiment. You can use surveys, polls, or ratings to collect feedback from users and A/B testing or experiments to compare different moderation responses and see which ones perform better.

5 How to customize moderation workflows?

The last step of customizing moderation tools is customizing your moderation workflows. These are the processes and procedures you use to moderate comments, such as when, how, and who moderates them. To make your workflows efficient, consistent, and transparent, you can automate moderation with rules, triggers, or schedules. Additionally, you can delegate some moderation tasks to your team members or partners. Furthermore, it’s important to communicate your moderation policies and guidelines to your users and moderators. This could include creating a moderation policy page that explains the rules and expectations of commenting on your platform. You may also want to create a moderation guide that provides tips and best practices for moderators.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?