Social media moderators, community managers, whatever the job title – they’re on the frontline of customer communications. Making sure your brand speaks in a unified voice, all your customer inquiries get answered, and weekend crises are resolved.
But they’re humans, like all of us, and sometimes they need a break. Let’s talk about the right social media moderation tools that can help, a lot.
- Why is social media moderation important?
- What does a social media content moderator really do?
- How can you improve content moderation on social media?
- Automate social media moderation
- One extra feature: Instagram direct message moderation (and Auto-moderation)
- Give your social media moderator a break (that’s more than a KitKat)
- Some things people ask about, a.k.a. FAQs
The best social media moderation tool
Manage all your comments, messages, and more – with an all-in-one social media tool. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Messenger, Google My Business, Google Play Store, and Apple App Store are supported.
Why is social media moderation important?
First of all, social media moderation is often underrated. Because, you know, community managers spend all of their work time on Facebook, right?
Well, not entirely. But before we delve into what a social media moderator does while they’re on Facebook (or Instagram), let’s look at why exactly their job should be one of your brand’s priorities.
Social media moderation is not just “scrolling Facebook.” It’s also:
- Engaging in conversations with your audience
- Building relationships with your potential and existing customers
- Helping build consistent brand communication
- Increasing your brand reach and traffic to your website
- Encouraging customers to create user-generated content, one of the best ways to engage your audience
- Saving your brand reputation by reacting quickly to inappropriate content or angry customer complaints
- Playing a crucial part in your social media customer service and your overall customer experience
- Moving your customers through your sales funnel and often helping you actually sell your products and services.
This seems much more than just scrolling cat GIFs all day (and often, all day, every day, even while on vacation, I’ll add. Which brings me to the next point.)
What does a social media content moderator really do?
Social media moderators do all of the above. But when we break it down into actual tasks, these will be, among others:
- Replying to comments from your customers – under your organic and sponsored content
- Replying to direct messages from people
- Deleting or hiding inappropriate content, competitors’ links, or abusive comments
- Keeping an eye on brand mentions on other social media profiles and reacting, if necessary
- Contacting the customer service team, product team, legal team, sales team – whoever can help answer a question that they themselves can’t
- Watching their mobile phones for notifications from their social media platform apps – usually not just during working hours, but late at night and on the weekends (and sometimes even on vacation)
- Which also means hardly ever putting their phone away
- Letting the team know when there’s a need for immediate reaction (a.k.a. a brand crisis on social media)
- And probably a lot more things you haven’t thought about.
And even though a lot of it sounds stressful (and certainly much more stressful than scrolling Facebook), it can also be very rewarding. But precisely because it can be stressful, and stress is usually not a great productivity booster (at least in the long run), a good social media moderation tool can go a long way (and make the job easier.)
And one of those social media content moderation tools is NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox.
You can test it for free here – no credit card required on signup 😉
How can you improve social media moderation?
Let’s take a look at this based on what you and your team can do to make social media moderation and community management easier and more productive. All while saving time and allowing your social media team to get some well-deserved time off.
Track and reply to all comments in one dashboard
Moderating social media without an external tool, especially if you’re in charge of multiple profiles on multiple social networks, can be a pain. (And that’s a euphemism.) You’re going to miss comments, or answer them late, work all the time and some more, and eventually, hate your job.
You don’t want to work a job you hate (or employ someone who hates their job AND has direct contact with your customer. Just think about it.)
Social media comment moderation tools like the Social Inbox are there to prevent this from happening – or help you when you’re already there.
With the Inbox, you can:
- Have all comments from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube in one place, along with direct messages from Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Oh, and Google reviews. In one place.
- Reply to them from the same dashboard, without going to each profile separately, and save yourself many hours in a week.
- Hide and delete comments whenever necessary.
- Also, see all the comments that appear under your Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ads – that you wouldn’t usually get notified about through the social platforms themselves.
- Also, get Facebook, Google Business locations, Apple App Store, and Google Play Store reviews in one place. If you use any of these platforms, you can seamlessly connect them to the Social Inbox, and your reviews will appear there as well.
Moreover, the Inbox has a built-in translation feature. You can translate and reply to your messages in over 100 languages supported by Google Translate.
If you imagine a social media moderator’s typical day, this means they sit down at their desk, log in to the Social Inbox, and have a look at all that’s been happening on social since they checked out of work the day before.
It’s easier for them to prioritize work, see if there are emergencies they need to tend to first, get rid of troll comments and spam, and reply to all the questions and messages. And might be a great way to reduce that morning anxious feeling of “what is it this time,” all community managers probably know.
The best social media moderation tool for teams
Use NapoleonCat to manage all your comments, messages, and more – with an all-in-one social media tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Messenger, Google My Business, Google Play Store, and Apple App Store.
Save time managing hundreds of Google reviews
This is a big one if you run physical locations people can find and rate on Google Maps – like stores or restaurants. Google reviews are a great source of recommendations from satisfied customers but can also go very wrong if someone had an unpleasant experience (and someone eventually will.)
And studies show 97% of consumers who read reviews also read businesses’ responses to these reviews – whether these are positive or negative reviews.
A social media moderator’s job is also often moderating these reviews – and with multiple locations, this channel alone can consume hours of their time. Using the Social Inbox can reduce that time many times over. Like in the case of this company, which – with around 500 locations and 1000-1500 Google reviews a month – reduced time spent on moderation to just 1-1.5 hours, 3-4 times a week.
NapoleonCat answers our needs. The consolidation of such a large number of stores and comments in one view is an incredibly helpful solution. We are given a bird’s eye view of the entire organization and the ability to spot both our strong points and areas which are still in need of improvement. We can more easily verify the procedures we have put in place (e.g. handling of complaints), assess how individual locations are performing, and monitor the shopping experience of our clients.
Customer Service Manager, CCC
Automate social media moderation
Want to save even more time moderating your socials? Let’s take a closer look at some of the automated social media moderation solutions in NapoleonCat.
Automatically reply to comments and messages (whenever appropriate)
Times when automation and social media seemed opposites are long gone. But the thing is to use automation wisely. One way to do that is to use Auto-moderation (which is part of the NapoleonCat tool) for some social interactions that might benefit from it (not all, obviously, will.)
You can use Auto-moderation to:
- Set auto-replies for repetitive questions in DMs or comments on Facebook and Instagram. These might be questions like “what does x cost?” or “what are your opening hours?”. Anything that people ask you about very often, saving you time to reply with the same thing manually every time.
- Automatically moderate questions that people ask while there’s no one there monitoring your Facebook Page or Instagram profile – like when it’s outside of your working hours, and your customers are spread all over the globe. You can, e.g., set up a reply letting your customer know there’s no one there at the moment, but you’ll get in touch the next day. Plus additionally, give them contact details to your customer service team in urgent cases.
- Automatically moderate inappropriate content like profanities, spam, etc. You can set up your Auto-moderation rules to automatically hide or delete comments with certain words or phrases, or, e.g., delete all comments with links under your ads on FB and IG (that usually come from competitors.)
How this works is you set up keywords that will trigger an automated reaction or a reply. To make the reply more personal, you can create several auto-responses for each set of keywords or phrases, and the tool will randomize them for you.
Of course, to make it look like all these are indeed coming from a real person (which they are), strive for a personal tone that will not make your brand look like a robot.
You can also define an automated response for specific days (like the weekend) and hours of the day for when you’re not available to moderate comments on your social channels.
Protect your social media from offensive comments and SPAM
Automatically hide or delete comments containing spam under your organic posts and ads – with an all-in-one social media moderation tool.
Delegate comment threads to team members
A social media moderator usually doesn’t work on their own. Questions people ask can be related to pricing, product details, terms of use – all kinds of stuff. So it’s only natural they’ll have to contact other teams at some point (or sometimes plain chase them around the office or the team Slack channel) – and then wait for them to reply.
To make this process easier for everyone, including the customer waiting for the answer to their burning question – social media content moderation tools often include collaboration features. And so does the Social Inbox.
You can delegate comment threads to designated team members, send them for consultation in an email, and exchange comments with others.
It really is like a hub connecting different teams in your organization: customer service, sales, marketing, legal, employer branding, etc. Making social media a truly integrated part of the customer experience, instead of the one channel no one wants to feel responsible for.
Moreover, the Inbox updates in real time, meaning that you will see what everyone else is doing. This way your work won’t overlap with your colleagues – no need to worry about answering the same comment or message twice.
Real-time social media collaboration inside the Inbox.
One extra feature: Instagram direct message moderation (and Auto-moderation)
This is a new and game-changing one, so it deserves its own section in this article.
Anyone whose daily tasks include Instagram moderation will know that Instagram’s native inboxes can be pretty tricky to manage – to say the least. Especially if you’re selling things via Instagram or manage a highly popular account that gets many questions and comments sent via the DMs.
Not so long ago, though, Facebook made the Messenger API available to selected social media management platforms (including NapoleonCat). As a result, the Social Inbox now allows you to manage and respond to Instagram DMs via the same interface you’re using to talk to people on Messenger and reply to comments across your social profiles.
Replying to Instagram DMs from desktop.
Do I need to add the part about how it can save you or your social media moderator time and stress fishing for things people who “slide in your DMs” ask your brand daily?
Thanks to Messenger opening Messenger API for Instagram messaging, NapoleonCat is now able to support Instagram DMs.
And yes, with NapoleonCat, you can also set auto-replies for your Instagram DMs.
Give your social media moderator a break (that’s more than a KitKat)
And get them the best content moderation tool that will make their job much easier – which will benefit not only your employee but also your brand. Remember – they’re often the first line of contact with your brand for your customers. You owe it to them – and yourself.
We highly recommend you test NapoleonCat for free to improve your social media moderation game (no credit card required 😉
(And if you’re reading this as an actual social media moderator or community manager – kudos to you. Now send this article to your boss.)
Social media moderation tool for teams
Moderate all comments and messages from one dashboard, individually or in a team – with an all-in-one social media tool (Instagram DMs and ads included!)
Some things people ask about, a.k.a. FAQs
What is social media moderation?
Social media moderation is the job of someone who:
- replies to comments, questions, and direct messages on social media
- deletes spam, profanities, and other inappropriate content
- talks to customers and followers, handles their complaints, and forwards them to other teams.
What is a social media moderation tool?
A social media moderation tool, like NapoleonCat, is used to simplify the process of managing social media interactions so that, for example, you don’t have to log in between different social media accounts and platforms.
It includes:
- Replying to comments, messages, and other interactions
- Deleting or hiding inappropriate comments
- Handling customer service issues; complaints, feedback, etc.
How do you moderate social media content?
There are several ways to go about social media moderation. The most basic one – but also the most time-consuming and ineffective – is logging into each of your social media profiles and manually answering, deleting, and hiding comments and messages from your audience. Virtually impossible if you have a large, engaged audience on multiple social networks, or manage social media for various brands.
The much more effective way is to use one of the available social media content moderation tools like NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox – where all the comments from all the profiles will make their way into one convenient dashboard.
How to become a social media moderator?
First of all, know what you’re up for. And that social media moderation is not the now proverbial Facebook-scrolling. You’ll need solid time-management and communication skills, so it’s a great job for someone who’s had experience in customer service, but also has a creative part that makes them a great fit for a job in marketing.
Because even though usually social media moderators and community managers are part of the marketing team, their skills and responsibilities are somewhere at the intersection of marketing, customer service, and sometimes sales. Keep that in mind when looking for a job as a social media moderator, as well as the fact that it can be a stressful job – but also very rewarding. Especially that first time you turn a customer complaint on social into a win for your brand or handle a social media crisis like a boss. The right tools will help you get there.
Comment moderation made easier
All your comments and messages in one view. Organic posts & Ads included. Automate replies, automatically delete spam, or auto-delete all comments for specific posts – with an all-in-one social media tool.
You may also like:
- The Essentials of Google Reviews Moderation
- The Best Facebook Moderation Tool for eCommerce
- How to Manage YouTube Comments for Multiple Channels
- Why You Should Automate Facebook Ad Comment Moderation
- How to Monitor Social Media for Negative Reviews and Protect Your Brand Reputation
- How to Build a Community on Social Media
- The Best Social Media Crisis Management Tool
- The Best Social Media Customer Engagement Tool
- How To Protect Your Brand from Instagram Trolls
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