The Difference Between Social Media Monitoring and Moderation

A feasible and systematic process for monitoring and moderating online content is a must, to help brands flourish in digital marketing. Social media monitoring and moderation are closely related that both processes involve very identical calls to action and end-goals for the brand.

By determining the difference between the two, business owners can maximize the advantages of establishing an online identity through using various social media channels.

Social media moderation vs. monitoring: What’s the difference?

• Monitoring scans and screens online content for relevant brand mentions

The main objective of monitoring for social media is to help businesses keep tabs on the factors affecting its online branding through the feedback it garners from its target audience, competitors, as well as its critics.

It basically means lending an open ear to what the public has to say about a brand’s lineup of products and services, interpreting the purpose behind each to help determine the right countermeasure.

This process scans a wide range of social media mediums and websites such as review pages, blogs, and even app stores. The content monitored is not controlled by the brand and thus gives businesses a clearer picture of how it impacts its resources and the industry at large.

How it works

Social media monitoring tools crawl social media pages and websites to find specific words, phrases, or sentences that mention the brand.

Queries can be specified to help the tool scour through the web for a specific type of mention—whether it is in the form of a review, forum discussion, promotion, or a customer complaint.

To help speed up the monitoring process while making searches more relevant, the monitoring process can be made to function based on customer demographic, scheduled daily or weekly or done in real-time.

Social media monitoring tools vary as well according to what the brand seeks to achieve through the employment of such service.

It can be research-centric, focused on customer engagement or simply centered on monitoring alone.
Data collected by monitoring tools are collated and used for reports and researches that seek to assist the brand’s campaigns and strategies for audience acquisition, retention, and product or service enhancement.

Ideally, a large resource of operators is a must to enable business owners to expand the advantages that a social media monitoring service can bring.

• Moderation involves managing the online community as well as the content generated by the social media page’s users

It scans user-generated content for any inappropriate or explicit details and then enforces the course of action necessary to resolve it. ‘Inappropriate’ can mean obscene words, images, or videos, spam, and even copyrighted materials.

Corresponding actions relating to harmful user-generated content can range from removing the offensive content, hiding it from other followers or online community members, and even blocking the user who violated the posting guidelines set by the social media channel’s moderators.

The assistance brought by social media moderation service is centered on upholding brand protection as well as enhanced customer experience.

While social media monitoring can be done on various websites and pages, social media moderation is only applicable on channels that the brand has control or authorization over.

How it works

In order to employ efficient moderation for a brand’s social media page, developing a precise and substantial moderating guideline should be a priority.

The guideline must be able to reflect the key objectives of the brand, while promoting a better image of the business throughout all its online communities.

Moderators must be able to efficiently examine and escalate each content so that in the long run, top-notch assistance and reliability can be assured to the users.

Similar to monitoring, the moderation process can also generate reports with statistics that represent and discuss how a brand’s online community is thriving—from enumerating increases and drops in the number of users, to specifying topics that have been trending among community members, along with identifying certain bans or warnings issued, if any.

Rivaling the unpredictable market: social media monitoring and moderation strategies for 2019

Demands and trends change very quickly that brands need to be as flexible and future-oriented as possible in order to properly assess and foresee the trajectory of their marketing tactics.

2018 was undoubtedly a scandalous time for social media, and it seems that several brands have become more cautious since. But 2019 is a new year, and frankly, social media will continue to be a vital part of today’s lifestyle and market.

Following the turbulent year that social media had to overcome, it is expected that customers will be more in favor of authentic online presence rather than a business social media page that’s bombarded with promotional talk.

Short-lived content, exhibited by Snapchat posts and Instagram and Facebook stories, along with Facebook groups and personalized service are gaining warmer receptions from followers. Customer support will be leaning more on social media, making 24/7 monitoring and accessibility a bigger necessity.

Bearing these new trends in mind, it is best to maintain a future-oriented and competitive strategy for social media monitoring and moderation through:

1. Defining the objectives for social media monitoring and moderation. As with any other digital marketing plan, knowing what the end-goal is, is a key factor in understanding the direction where the strategy should be heading.
2. Discovering and learning engagement patterns and behaviors of target audience to help devise more effective moderation policies that will adhere to the security of the brand’s online community.From the perspective of social media monitoring, this is also a great way to tap into the right trends that make an impact to a business’ target audience.
3. Taking a closer look at what posts gain higher interaction from followers from those that do not. While not all posts generate the equal number of responses, the difference in reception may be a sign that the campaign needs to be enhanced for it to truly reach the intended recipients.
4. Creating a social media posting plan to map out frequency and content of posts shared on social media pages. By setting a weekly objective in mind, it will be easier to find trends, hashtags and updates related to the services or products being endorsed.
5. Checking what social media networks generate the most traffic as well as taking note of channels and online communities that are more prone to incidences of users posting inappropriate content or getting into quarrels with fellow community members.
6. Being more responsive to customer feedback. Whether it is a positive comment, a complaint, or a product query, always be quick to accommodate customers online.It reflects good customer support and also helps make the UGC process more efficient since unnecessary content such as spam, fake reviews and inappropriate posts can be detected more instantly.
7. Integrating social media moderation and monitoring strategies with SEO practices leverage the brand’s online presence and interaction with its audience. It helps brand owners maintain a competitive edge all while staying attuned to the relevant issues affecting their communities.

Smart moderation and monitoring will inevitably transform social media channels into a credible extension of a business’ services

Monitoring social media channels, function more of an observation tool and it cannot implement any course of action on brand mentions. On the other hand, moderation allows content to be acted upon.
When the two processes are employed in perfect harmony, it will be easier for business owners to track how significant changes on their services have affected their target audience and affiliates.
In time, the results delivered by efficient monitoring and moderation process will serve as a point of reference for businesses to improve its online community and branding.
Are you in need of an online marketing expert to help boost your social media monitoring and moderation practices? Send us a message!