Online communities effectively use moderation tools to protect users from harmful online behaviour. The main aim of moderation is mitigating the risk of harmful content and providing a high-end user experience. Well-drafted community guidelines are also critical for safeguarding the interest of both users and organizations.
However, the scenario is rapidly changing. With an increase in the trends of live blogging, real-time chats, and live-streaming, the need for automated filtering is imminent. Chat-filtering is one such critical area where most communities still struggle.
Many automated chat moderation and management tools have shown positive results. If you want to know more about community chats, head to Viafoura.
Need For Filtering Chats
Before investing in such tools, let us first understand why filtering out chats in online communities is essential.
To Avoid Toxicity
The chances of users leaving your online community increase when exposed to toxic content. In other forms of content such as articles and blogs, users can choose to either read or ignore them.
But going through a chat or comment section automatically exposes a user to available content. Therefore, chat moderation or filtering out is essential to protect the users from harmful content.
The stakeholders should make efforts to filter out abusive, derogatory, illegal, and copyrighted content. If left unchecked, such comments deliver a negative message that your organization endorses such activities.
Control Spamming
Posting irrelevant long blocks of text and links derails the purpose of the conversation. It makes it difficult to engage a visitor interested in meaningful discussion and insights. Here comes the importance of automated chat moderation tools.
It effectively detects and filters out repeated texts and unwanted links. This makes the conversation clean and purposeful for visitors.
Enhance User-Experience
A community’s online forum leaves a lasting impression on new or existing users. By providing a safe and private environment, you can promote a healthy interactive platform to users. In addition, a social experience free from negative content helps in enhancing the overall user experience.
Generate Quality Leads
Your community followers are the true reflection of your brand. Therefore maintaining a quality fan base is the key. Furthermore, maintaining the sanity of the comment section is also critical to turning a visitor into a subscriber. If a visitor finds your forum insightful, the probability of subscribing increases. In contrast, an unmanaged forum can have the opposite reaction.
Help In Identifying Context Or Purpose
A visitor can summarize the online discussion by reading a few quality comments. Whereas a comment section full of spam and irrelevant information can confuse the visitor. This is why brands pin useful and most liked comments on the top of the comment section. It helps identify the context or purpose of the discussion quickly.
Enhance Brand Image
Business rivals will leave no stone unturned to demean your campaign. They can bombard your comment section with negative reviews by using fake accounts and chatbots. To check such activities, filtering the comments becomes a necessity.
Similarly, unhappy customers can significantly damage your brand image by posting illegal content. While it is good to accept disagreeing comments, filtering the derogatory comment has its benefits.
On the flip side, a string of healthy discussions about your product and services helps advertise your brand, ultimately building your brand image.
Enhances Website SEO
Thoughtful online discussions and forums can help build your online community. When users comment about your product and services, it helps generate backlinks. Similarly, satisfied users tag or invite their friends to join the forum. This ultimately increases the traffic to your website.
Furthermore, a bulk of unwanted chats, images, and videos can affect your website’s performance. These can also slow down your website. Timely filtering out spam and irrelevant content takes the burden off.
Tips To Enhance Safety And Privacy Of Online Forums
Maintaining a safe community while increasing the brand’s visibility takes a lot of effort. Therefore, chat moderators should continuously strive to make the forum more welcoming while upholding the community guidelines.
Here are some tips to enhance the safety and privacy of online forums.
- Use automated moderation tools to handle large bulk of data effectively. Such tools detect and filter-out data based on a predetermined set of rules.
- Block comments with phone numbers, email, or URLs to protect users’ sensitive information. Accidental or intentional, such information makes the users vulnerable to personal attacks.
- Block certain words that can affect your brand’s image. For instance, a product launching forum blocked the phrase “I hate this product.”
- When fake links are easy to create, it’s even easier for individuals to click on them. These malicious links could generate spyware tools or viruses to affect their account or, even worse, machines. Ensure preventing the exchange of such links. Utilize tools that efficiently scan the posted links beforehand to flag the potential spam.
- Allow only registered users to comment. It helps in increasing the safety and privacy of the users.
- Create community guidelines and make the users agree to them. Enforce the community guidelines strictly by giving warnings and, if necessary, suspending the account. By doing this, you can effectively communicate your intentions and set rules for the users to abide by. An effective community guideline covers:
- Terms of service & acceptable usage policy.
- Purpose of the community.
- Acceptable and unacceptable actions or behaviours.
- Penalties for violation of community rules.
- Limit access to some areas of the forum.
- Losing posting privileges: temporary or permanent.
- Suspension or termination of the account.
Endnote
In any community or online forum, the comment section is where most of the discussion takes place. Therefore, filtering out comments is critical to prevent and mitigate the negative effect while maintaining prosocial behaviour.
However, excess moderation is not advisable. In pursuit of economic goals, do not forget user experience and preferences. Hence, you should do moderation in conjunction with user behaviour.
Considering the benefits, a community management and monitoring tool is indeed a viable option. It empowers the stakeholders to monitor, manage, and optimize user-generated content in terms of their community guidelines. At the same time, it makes the content relevant to your brand and users.
