How to craft an effective social media moderation plan in 2024

How you moderate online conversations can make or break your brand. Whether you’re a PR strategist or a social media manager, knowing how to navigate online interactions is important. This includes understanding the stakes your brand has during crises and significant cultural moments.

Managing social media moderation is critical as news becomes more continual and even more immediate. With fast-paced social feeds cycling from one event to the next, the internet can feel like the Wild West. In this guide, we’ll define social media moderation and how to leverage it to communicate during global movements.

What is social media moderation?

Social media moderation is the process of managing both positive and negative interactions across your brand’s social profiles. It includes monitoring debates and discussion, and removing violent or otherwise harmful content. An effective social media monitoring strategy requires brands to walk a fine line between encouraging the free expression of thought and mitigating the risks of offensive content.

Major events can generate a lot of social media comments and content that are ripe for questionable hot takes. Even if your brand isn’t taking a public stance, you can still be pulled into  discussions related to that topic among your followers.

Creating a space that fosters healthy, respectful conversation can boost your brand image and offer something important to your audience aside from your products and services. As a brand or business, how do you ensure that the conversations you take part in or host are appropriate? Enter social media moderation.

Why is social media content moderation important?

Businesses on social media contribute to the safety and integrity of social media channels. Yes, social media is an important part of marketing, sales and audience engagement. But how brands manage social campaigns and the communities built around them can have ripple effects on the internet—and discourse—at large.

It creates a safe environment

Offering support to people when they need it most builds loyalty. They know when there’s a disconnect between a brand’s values and how they promote a product or service. While the Sprout Social Index™ 2023 found that only 21% of consumers choose to follow brands based on shared values, you never know when your brand could get wrapped up in a crisis that affects customer sentiment, safety and loyalty.

When the Jamie Lloyd Company in London’s West End announced a new production of Romeo and Juliet in April 2024, there was racist backlash from some social media users against the actress cast as Juliet, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers. The production’s director took a swift public stance, sharing a statement on the production’s social media pages.

The statement called the online bullying “deplorable,” and made it clear the theater and production company would not tolerate the behavior. They limited comments on the posts to ensure their pages didn’t house further bullying and upsetting content. This response is a good example of standing for your team’s safety, as well as the safety of your social media audience.

When forming your approach to moderation, ask yourself: What is the balance of authenticity and remaining true to your brand identity? Speaking on the sensitive issues you believe in may attract pushback with many different opinions and commentary. By filtering out unwanted or offensive comments, you create a safe environment for your audience to participate in discussion.

It provides your audience with a platform they can trust

Social and world events impact your brand’s online presence and community. Some people take advantage of these moments to share hateful messages for personal gain or to increase their own profile traffic. During these periods of high engagement, you need to have control of the information on your social pages. This includes removing obvious bot comments when possible.

Moderating any misleading user-generated content ensures your audience has a credible source of truth.

It protects your brand image

You hope to drive engagement or product awareness with your social campaigns. Sometimes user-generated content can deviate from your purpose; it can even create an unexpected controversy involving your brand image.

Implementing moderation standards reduces the risk of unwanted content damaging your brand identity. While not every negative comment is a crisis, the way you approach controversies can help curb one.

It reduces misinformation

Misinformation and “fake news” are prolific on social media. Conspiracy theories and misrepresentations of world events spread more easily on social channels than traditional media platforms with safeguards in place to dispel myths.

While your brand can’t—and shouldn’t—attempt to correct every off-the-wall theory out there, you can play a vital role in stopping the spread of malicious and divisive misinformation on your profiles.

It promotes regulatory compliance

Certain industries have strict regulations to protect privacy and avoid legal issues. Brands in the US healthcare space, for example, must adhere to HIPAA rules and avoid sharing patients’ personal health information. If you’re a company that needs to work within HIPAA on social media, you can include a process to monitor for posts that include personal health information so they can be quickly removed.

Some countries have laws that govern online content, and your brand’s content must adhere to those rules to operate in those regions.

It prevents cyberbullying

Cyberbullying and harassment can unfortunately begin on and quickly escalate via social media. For example, influencers on social media often experience bullying. Brands partnering with an influencer should take responsibility for moderating and removing malicious comments about the influencer that may appear on the brand’s social accounts.

Social media moderation allows you to detect and squash harassment before it takes off, whether for your audience or your social media team.

How to create a social media content moderation plan for your brand

To successfully moderate content on your social profiles, you’ll need to develop a moderation strategy. The following tips will help you devise a plan that safeguards your brand and community.

1. Establish tangible goals

The first step in developing a social media monitoring plan is knowing what you want to achieve.  Set reasonable, measurable goals so you can analyze and improve upon your efforts.

You can aim to do things like implement a social media crisis response framework by the second half of the year, or maintain a customer survey response rate of 90% or higher.

2. Understand your audience

Nuances in who makes up your audience should inform the rules you develop for community engagement.

Start by identifying the primary demographics of your audience, including age, location and interests. Next, explore how customers engage and interact with your brand, including user behaviors and typical interaction patterns. These may vary by platform, so don’t limit your research to a single brand profile.

3. Perform a communications audit

Evaluating your current strategic communications efforts can uncover strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Conduct an communications audit to better understand your audience’s needs and priorities. A simple SWOT analysis on your audience’s engagement habits will inform your strategy and prepare you to be proactive instead of reactive during periods of high engagement.

4. Set clear moderation guidelines

Establishing clear guidelines upfront will benefit your brand and your audience.

Use your company values and any legal requirements to develop your moderation approach. Layout rules on what types of content will be allowed in your comment sections and closed communities, and define consequences for violations. You can have different consequences depending on the channel or situation, and specify what you have zero tolerance for.

5. Establish response strategies

Negative comments can vary in their severity, so you can’t respond to everyone the same way. Instead, build out a response plan that speaks to different types of situations that may arise and how you’ll approach them.

Start by establishing a service level agreement (SLA) that sets expectations around social media response times. This removes ambiguity about the time it takes your team to respond to pressing issues.

From there, create a social media customer response matrix that provides your customer care team with on-brand responses for praise, critique and everything in between. A generative AI tool can help you come up with a variety of responses so you can avoid sounding repetitive. If you’re using Sprout Social, you can save response templates and use our Enhance by AI Assist  to personalize replies and enhance the tone of voice.

If you manage a closed community (like a Facebook Group or Discord community), you should also create templates for community guideline violations. For example, the r/legaladvice community has specific guidelines about what responses may and may not include. When a comment violates their rules, a moderator will delete the comment and respond with a template explaining why.

6. Assess which moments are right for brand involvement

As mentioned earlier, your core values should guide your social marketing efforts. If a response is needed, they can help guide your interaction while protecting your brand.

For example, in 2020, Peloton created the Peloton Pledge—a formal commitment to becoming an anti-racist organization.‌ In 2021, after an uptick in violent hate crimes involving Asian Americans, the company used this pledge as reason to take action.

The exercise brand took to social media to announce that they were making a $100,000 donation to the Asian American Federation. Peloton fans posted on social media to praise the company for its actions because the brand stayed true to its company values in relation to the tragic events.

This is also a strong example of getting familiar with the current conversation before posting. Social listening helps you assess the intersections between your audience and the larger situation. If it doesn’t relate to your audience or brand, it’s better to stay silent rather than be inauthentic.

7. Form a proactive plan of action

Get ahead of any sticky situations that may take off with your audience. With strategic guidelines in place, you’ll be in a better position to act and respond quickly during tough times. When things go wrong, having a strategy to fall back on will make handling the crisis easier. ‌

Your plan should help maintain brand loyalty and build support for your brand amongst your audience while maintaining brand values. In addition to assessing when and how your brand should activate its moderation strategy, think through the following:

• Create a list of brand dos and don’ts that guide your team in moments of uncertainty.
• Create a flow chart that determines if the situation is relevant to your brand or values. If yes, proceed by mapping out responses. If no, consider pressing pause.
• Organize response templates that can help inform what to say, so you can be prepared to address comments your brand deems worth responding to.
• Elect a dedicated member or team to monitor conversations on your social posts.

8. Prepare a crisis communication plan

Your first step in managing a crisis is ‌ developing a process for crisis prevention. Your brand may experience insensitive comments, product mishaps, employee errors or site outages, all of which can quickly spiral into a social media crisis.

Prepare a crisis communication plan that supports the early detection of content that may trigger a serious issue. Next, define steps for quick response, escalation and coordination with PR or legal teams if necessary.

9. Develop special considerations for owned communities

Taking the time to nurture a community can pay dividends in brand engagement and loyalty. Moderation is key to a thriving, safe community. Foster positive interactions through proactive engagement like polls, Q&A sessions or contests. Spotlight positive user-generated content to encourage adherence to community standards, and be consistent with your moderation practices.

In Sprout’s user community The Arboretum, we keep our moderation approach positivity-centered. Sprout’s Senior Community Strategist, Jonathan Zuluaga, offered the following best practices to keep in mind:

• Establish rules and guidelines upfront and apply them evenly and fairly. “Creating a space that is fair and equal gives all members the opportunity to participate and engage,” Zuluaga said.
• Lean on your star members. In any community, a handful of members will stand out as “superstar” supporters. Zuluaga recommends prioritizing interactions with these people, and soliciting their ideas for community improvement and engagement.
• Ask for feedback. “At the Arboretum our feedback survey has been insanely helpful, from guiding conversations to helping us create programming and the space our members need,” Zuluaga said. Incorporate consistent feedback requests as part of your moderation plan.

10. Document and report on your strategy

Proper documentation will save you a lot of trouble down the road. Keep in mind that having a single individual hold all the knowledge about your social moderation approach can cause problems if they’re unavailable during a sensitive situation. Documentation ensures you have the needed tools to get other team members up to speed. ‌Maintain detailed records of moderation actions and outcomes, including posts removed, frequency of post removals, who acted and if there was any follow-up required afterward.

Regular reports on key metrics are useful for keeping management and leadership teams informed of challenges and successes in your moderation approach.

Social media content moderation best practices and tips

While you can create an action plan to help prepare your brand for most situations, the unpredictability of world events will still call for nuance in your execution. Here are some best practices for social media moderation.

When should my brand stay silent on tough issues?

If you’re uncertain when to speak or stay silent, ask yourself if it’s appropriate to contribute to a tough cultural moment. Do you have any data or insights from your community to justify going quiet for a few days?

Remember, staying silent isn’t going dark. To clarify, social silence is a strategic pause on content that’s either not relevant to the current situation or doesn’t contain critical information for your audience at the time.

During the 2023 wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric Industries stopped all content that wasn’t about the wildfires or disaster response. Their normally varied, busy Instagram account pivoted to sharing only updates on outages, restoration efforts and fire updates for a few weeks to ensure residents could get the most up-to-date information without the clutter.

When should my brand pause publishing?

On top of not commenting, you may need to pause all social content. Before hitting pause, ask yourself if the world needs to hear from your brand right now.

How should I respond to public criticism?

How you handle public criticism determines the path to maintaining your reputation. The most important tactic: Do not ignore negative comments. You should aim to reply to most comments—positive, neutral or negative.

When facing criticism, you want to help fix the situation, not escalate it. Resolving criticism takes a lot of consideration and patience. Teach your team the benefits of understanding effective customer service. You should also have guidelines for escalation management and a social media crisis plan to help navigate tough situations.

How do I navigate comments that cannot be resolved?

Individually responding to inbound posts or comments strengthens your brand’s relationship with its customers. However, comments that veer into hate language (racist, sexist and derogatory) may not be resolved or warrant an individual response.

Look into adding an exclusion list to your pages that’ll automatically filter out unwanted comments. You could also pin your brand’s community engagement guidelines so users will know what types of comments won’t be tolerated. And sometimes, the best course of action is to delete the offending comment.

Moderation + consistency = a strong brand reputation

Communicating with your audience during crises or world events may seem overwhelming. With social media moderation, you can tackle and mitigate any tricky conversations that may arise. Consistently applying your social media moderation strategy will help you foster a strong, positive reputation among your audience.

Now that you know how to moderate tough conversations online, consider creating a social media crisis communication strategy. Being able to plan for the worst and adapt quickly is critical for social media. With these assets at your side, you’ll be ready to handle sensitive situations or emergencies that come your way.