A social media presence gives your organization the chance to meaningfully connect with people interested in your services. To get the most out of your social media presence, you need to foster two-way communication by monitoring for, and responding to comments. Monitoring for comments can help a customer feel special, it can stop misinformation before it starts and it can boost views to your page. It can take some time (we’ve got great hacks for you in a minute!) but it’s so worth it. So here is a quick guide for quality social media monitoring, and a few tools we love to use.
What to Monitor For
First, set your intention and anticipate what your audience will need. Businesses get questions about hours, products, etc., advocacy groups educate followers, and so on, so plan for incoming comments accordingly. Spend time deciding what types of comments need a response and what types are better left to themselves.
Guidelines For Responses
Questions: A best-case scenario is a customer or client reaching out to find ways to use your services. You don’t want to miss questions like that, so set a goal to always respond within 24 hours. Of course, the best way to catch these comments quickly is to have alerts always on.
Misinformation: Misunderstandings happen more for certain types of organizations than others. Responding quickly and respectfully will help stop misinformation before it starts. Consider preparing a blog or landing page on your website to link to in your responses if you keep seeing the same types of misinformation commented.
Engagement: Comments expressing appreciation are so nice to receive! Something as simple as “You are great!” can draw a few more views when you respond with a quick “Thank you!” or even a simple “like” reaction. Engagement and the opportunity to exhibit a good relationship with customers is so valuable. Similar to questions, try your best to respond to general comments within 24 hours.
Negative comments: Here’s where we need to recognize nuance. Not all negative comments are worth responding to (and all comments boost views!). But if someone goes too far, you need a plan. Knowing what crosses the line depends heavily on your brand. A family-friendly brand will draw the line in a different place than an edgy brand. There are a few things, however, that can not be ignored: bigotry, offensive language or comments that get too personal or make someone doubt their safety. What do you do when a commentor goes too far?
The “hide” function is your friend. A hidden comment will still be seen by the commentor (which is important because sometimes “deleting” will inspire more comments) but the general public will no longer see the comment.
Deleting comments should be used very sparingly. Only delete when a comment is particularly offensive or contains serious misinformation.
Blocking a commentor is an absolute last resort. Save this move for a scenario where it’s unmanageable to deal with a commentor in any other way. If a commentor is making someone feel unsafe or if comments become harassing, blocking could be the right option.
Tools For Monitoring
Your best and simplest option is to simply make sure notifications are on, on each page you moderate. For larger campaigns or pages with lots of followers, some automated settings can help.
Facebook Content Moderation: this setting offers you the ability to automatically hide or delete comments with certain words. This could be a good option for repeat offenders or regular misinformation. Go to your page settings, content moderation or profanity filter, and add your banned words separated by commas.
Paid tools like agorapulse, social sprout or hootsuite will have efficient options for quality monitoring. Prices vary. And of course, moderators will still need to manually watch for incoming comments and respond.
Comment moderating is an important part of a healthy social media presence. Our own client packages will always include some level of moderation, so for support please contact us!
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