Chats happen in real time. This can raise concerns over how to best moderate, maintain your group's culture and safety, and, importantly, respect your time. Building a moderation team can help alleviate these concerns.
As an admin, you may already be familiar with moderating posts on your group’s feed (if not, we have many resources on group moderation). But when it comes to moderating community chats, they may require a different approach. Specifically:
Chats need real-time moderation: Because chat communication is instantaneous, members expect issues to be resolved in a fast manner.
For real-time moderation to happen, chats need a moderator presence: Members feel safer and are more likely to engage in chats when the moderation team shows some type of presence. This doesn’t always have to be achieved via a human moderator; for example, Admin Assist can help automate a lot of moderation tasks.
We know admins like you want the best for your communities, but it can be hard to keep up with real-time chat discussions. A passionate moderation team can help you—and your group—thrive. Along with using tools like Admin Assist, recruiting a team will:
Assist with your workload
Help resolve issues faster
Help enable members to form closer connections
Help members to engage authentically
Give those on your moderation team a stake in the group, empowering them to become group advocates, both online and off
All of the above will, in turn, help keep your community cordial and safe
There are currently two distinct roles within the moderation team, each with a set of permissions when it comes to Community Chats:
Admins: Have full permissions for managing chats, from creating and deleting chats to accessing Admin Assist and more. For a list of permissions, see here.
Moderators: Have most of the permissions of an admin, except they can’t do the following: add or remove the community chats feature from the group, access Admin Assist, and manage whether or not the member-suggested chats feature is enabled.
When a member is promoted to an admin or moderator, they become an admin or moderator of the whole Facebook group.
Steps to build a moderation team
Chats can often be unpredictable given their real-time nature. Before you begin onboarding a moderation team, consider putting together a playbook of dos and don’ts for how to handle certain situations. For example, one situation may warrant direct messaging a warning, while another may warrant first bringing it up in the Admin and moderator-only chat and discussing as a team. Documenting these guidelines will help make it easier to train your team and give everyone a source of truth to refer back to.
You probably have some members who are very active in the chats. They might be the ones who start conversations, answer other people’s questions, or spur engagement by posting polls. More likely than not, they’re active because they’re passionate about the community you’ve built! Reach out to them and ask if they’d be interested in joining your moderation team, and if they are, you can officially invite them to one of the two moderation team roles.
Max T. of MediaVerse: Comics Unwrapped uses chats to engage his members in real-time conversations over the most recent entertainment releases. To keep up with the volume of chats, he looks at the most active (and respectful) members in the group to find future members of his moderation team.
“We’ll reach out and say, “Hey, we love that you’re a member here and we see that you’re very active, would you want to be a moderator [of our chat]?”
Max T., MediaVerse: Comics Unwrapped
With a team by your side, you can split up tasks so that each person has a specific point of focus. As you do so, it helps if the team not only understands their individual roles, but everyone else’s as well. A team that’s on the same page, and knows who does what, is more likely to solve issues faster.
For Max T., the roles he assigns are based on skill sets and interests to keep the team engaged with the chats they moderate in MediaVerse: Comics Unwrapped.
“We definitely like to make sure that everybody can cover different things [in the chats], for example, we have one person who’s really great at promoting engagement.”
Max T., MediaVerse: Comics Unwrapped
Although chats are always-on, you and your team are not. Discuss time availability with your moderation team to set boundaries and create a schedule. Remember, Admin Assist is always here to help.
Justin B. of SneakerHeads®, whose group has connected in chats over sneaker culture, takes time zones into account when scheduling availability for his moderation team.
“We’ve got some people on the East Coast, some people on the West Coast, people in between, so we’ve always got somebody paying attention to what’s going on in the [chat] channels.”
Justin B., SneakerHeads®
Despite great planning and time management, life happens and things come up unannounced. Don’t be afraid to ask your team for support in times of need—and let your team know to do the same. The Admod-only chat is a great space for your team to communicate about anything with your moderation team.
Your moderation team is not alone. From Admin Assist to other controls, we have a suite of tools to support and empower you from day one. Read through our article on moderation tools, and consider sending it to your team to review.
We recognize that community chats may require some additional work (especially in the beginning), but they can bring immense value to your group like real-time content sharing and collaboration, deeper engagement, and closer connections.
