6 Key Factors To Consider When Outsourcing Social Media Moderation

Cleaning up the house is a mundane task that distracts your team from creating content, planning contests and engaging with your fans. For this reason, many brands have opted to outsource social media moderation. However just as you wouldn’t put your child in the hands of the first so-called nanny on the street, there are a few critical factors you should take into consideration when choosing a moderation partner.

Maximum response time

A comment can go viral in only a few minutes and once it has been seen, liked and replied to by thousands of people, there’s usually no way of going back. If your page is only moderated every few hours, a lot of damage can occur before the harmful comment is discovered by the moderation agency. An experienced social media agency should be able to offer you a variety of maximum response times, so you can chose the one that best fits your needs. Maximum response time means the time lapse between a comment being posted on your page and it being picked up by a moderator. If the moderation company is not able to give you a maximum response time, be worried – they may only be checking your page on an ad hoc basis.

Pricing

Pricing for moderation services is usually determined based on a good range of factors: how often the page should be checked, how much the engagement level of your page is and whether you want 24/7 moderation or only out of office hour service. As there are many elements that make up a moderation package, be sure to not compare apples to oranges, for example many agencies charge a separate set-up fee that ranges between $2000 and $6000 while others include it in the price package. For this reason, always ask the agency to specify each component of the quote so that you can make a fair judgment.

Complementing services

Whether customer support service should be in-house or outsourced is always a tricky question for many social media and brand managers. On one hand, they want to keep full control of responding to customers in a personalized manner. On the other hand, it is not easy for social media and brand managers to go through thousands of comments per day to find a support question. A good moderation agency can be the perfect solution. Many agencies, including BrandBastion, have in their moderation package a support issue service. Questions or issues that need your in-house customer support team’s attention will be delivered to you on a regular basis so that your team is only a mouse click away from connecting with the customers.

“Hide” feature

Depending on your moderation needs, you may want the agency to be able to offer different features in moderating your brand page. If your primary focus is to remove spam, deleting the harmful comments from spammers alone is usually efficient. However, if your brand page needs more of a human touch, such as removing defamatory comments, mean comments towards other fans, sarcastic content or hate speech, simply deleting may make the commenter even more aggressive on other platforms.

The safe choice in these situations is to hide the defamatory comments so that the commenter and his/her Facebook friends can still see his/her comment without the comment being visible to the general public. As an informed customer, it is best to confirm with your prospective service provider if they are able to offer this feature.

Reporting

When you have an agency moderating comments on your page, you may want to know what has been done without having to constantly be on your page watching the agency doing their job. So when shopping, make sure to ask your desired agency to send you regular reports to ensure that the moderation is carried out with highest quality.

There are some resemblances between finding a perfect social media moderation solution and finding a perfect life partner: it’s definitely not a one-time thing, you may have to go on a few dates to meet your match - but after you have found the perfect one, you can sleep soundly at night, knowing that your best match is right by your side and your “house” is kept clean. However, the last point may not apply for life partners.