With the rapidly evolving landscape of tools, suites and products being announced, not to mention the social media scandal of the month, it’s easy to lose sight of a key success factor to effectively moderate and monitor your owned and earned channels. Process.  

This column will delve into what makes a good process and also discuss process’s first cousin, priorities.

Why is process so important when it comes to social media moderation?

Process is important because it forces you maintain a consistent approach to your social media moderation, helps you maintain a unified brand voice, and enables you to respond to social crises effectively.

For example, you may have multiple people on your social media team who respond to comments or posts on your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sites. Each team member has their own style and voice. Without process, your team members could respond to people in completely different ways. Or, they prioritize one channel over another, leaving some comments to go cold. 

The result? One of your fans has one experience and another fan has a completely different experience. Or, worse, you could have a crisis on your hand, like these companies. 

Building a process also ensures you avoid providing a bad customer service experience. In the following example, Old Spice made a serious gaffe by asking one of the customers to call them for help, rather than just helping them over direct message, right then and there.

To combat these inconsistencies, you need a defined social media moderation process.

Follow best practices for social media moderation by creating consistent and regularly updated processes 

By process we mean an agreed upon and published set of steps that your staff or your outside moderation partner follow daily when protecting the brand, performing social customer service or promoting content. Employees and all other contributors chartered with helping your brand follow these steps.

The process should be periodically reviewed as your strategies and plans change to make sure the hour by hour, day to day operations of your social media efforts support your business.  Hopefully you’ve initially put these processes in place to support the overall objectives. As mentioned above, the landscape quickly changes for your brand-new products, new promotions, new competition, new markets.  When you organize or meet to re-visit process and priorities, try to assess if they need tweaking or major changes based upon new. 

The importance of regular or shift-based reporting

Even during a period of relative stability, it’s good to review the tactical aspects of your work. Several of our clients, in the high-volume world of consumer, review the priorities of each shift quarterly; making sure that the most important aspects of their business are checked first; in case super high volumes result in overage of content.

Let’s illustrate the mechanics of process with a recent real-life case study.  A client of ours left her position and took over social media director’s job for a consumer brand.  She inherited a competent staff, but with a hodge-podge approach for priorities across FB, IG Twitter and Reviews. They are currently chartered with moderation Monday-Friday from 7am to 9pm. 

The new company makes a fantastic product, is growing and understands the value of social customer service, but there was no published list of moderator tasks or priorities.  Or even the concept of a shift. Sometimes posts and feedback were responded to immediately; other times when her staff was engrossed in digital/brick and mortar promotional events, some customer feedback/inquiries sat for several days. 

How to set up a shift-based process that provides consistent information flow for you to act on

Setting both a process and prioritization are essential to your success.  Our client set about defining a ‘standard’ shift for moderation. Whether you define it as 15,30 or 60 minutes, this author is a huge proponent of defining and publishing guidelines.

She opted to first prioritize the ‘order’ in which the social channels were reviewed during each ‘shift’.  Given the possibly complex nature of social customer service interactions, the team decided to publish guidelines where the ‘easier’ channels were checked first. The rationale was that simple posts wouldn’t sit for days if they got swamped with customer service issues. 

Moderation Shift: Priority Flow

Now that the priorities were set; they moved onto process. Oh, by the way, the team also decided that each ‘shift’ would follow the same priority.  Another option would be to set up two or even three different cadences. We’ve seen this multiple priority approach work effectively for large global brands.

How do I set up an effective social media moderation process?

If you are just getting familiar with these processes, start with a simple three box flow of a moderation process.  Box one is labeled ‘START’. Box Two is labeled ‘PROCESS’ and Box Three is labeled ‘END’. Sometimes starting with a blank whiteboard and a room full of your colleagues waiting for you to lay it all out for them can be daunting.  But you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the power of visualization and iteration. With the right people in the room a preliminary, but detailed workflow can be created from that three box flow in less than fifteen minutes. Guaranteed.  A great way to drive deeper into the process is by asking a simple question: ‘and then what happens?’

The below process flow is a simple, four-step process that is easy to remember and follow. 

Don’t create so much process that you ruin your customers’ experience with your brand

However, there’s a trade-off between keeping everything inside staff’s head or collective memory vs erring on the side of 16 steps with 8 pages of footnotes. Make sure you focus on solving the customer’s problem! Don’t create a process that only adheres to internal processes or silos. Remember your customer and put yourself in their shoes.

Yes, that sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised by the caliber of the companies that miss this point. This next example comes from American Express and shows how they created an inefficient process where they redirect every customer inquiry to a different AmEx twitter account. Why can’t they just ask questions of American Express’ main twitter account? That’s a horrible experience for customers.

Creating a process also means that everyone has to follow it

There’s going to be a learning curve for staff and outside partners alike. I know it sounds obvious, but you need to follow the process. It takes the right kind of mindset to consistently adhere to a process. You need to make sure you have the right people on your internal team or outsource to a partner who has a history of consistent results.

Conclusion

That’s it for now. In closing I’d recommend the following, ahem, 3-step process, as you move forward:

1. Inventory all existing processes that involve social media moderation/monitoring
2. If none or some don’t exist, create them and put into effect
3. Review periodically and ALWAYS keep your customer in mind