Conversocial - Makes moderating Facebook easy

Q&A with Joshua March, CEO of The iPlatform, creators of the Conversocial Facebook moderation tool.

iPlatform have just released Conversocial v2 and we've been honestly delighted with the tool since we've been using it, and we are now recommending it to most of our Facebook clients.  I thought it was time to shed some light on this excellent way of moderating Facebook Fan Pages.  

Firstly, Josh, a little bit about The iPlatform.  You're one of the few approved Facebook development companies in the UK.  How did you start and what other Facebook work do you do?

When the Facebook platform launched in 2007, I saw it as a new paradigm for how companies could market and interact with customers. I started running the Facebook Developer Garage events for Facebook, and at the beginning of 2008 launched iPlatform as a technology company specialising in building applications and software for social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Since then, we’ve delivered a huge number of interactive campaigns in Facebook for brands and agencies, in the UK, US and Europe, as well as working directly with Facebook here in the UK to support them on their regional campaigns (e.g. during the general election).  We believe that public conversations between companies and their customers will become the primary way B2C communication takes place in the next couple of years, and this is changing how marketing and customer service is managed. Conversocial is a platform for managing these conversations.

Why did you think it necessary to build Conversocial?

More and more brands are setting up Facebook pages (and other social presences), but currently there’s a real lack of tools to help manage the content from fans. As you're well aware, there's no pre-moderation on Facebook, so whatever is posted is up there immediately. It can be really damaging for the brand and off-putting or offensive - even potentially dangerous - for your fanbase.  Facebook's own limited moderation tools leave moderators wasting a lot of time searching to locate new content and filling in elaborate shift handovers so that the next moderator online can find what's not yet been checked.

As well as managing the incoming content, success in Facebook requires that your fan page is highly engaged; 85% of engagement with fan pages takes place in the Facebook homepage, in response to updates – fans don’t generally go to a fan page unless they’re prompted. This means that even a million fans have zero value if you’re not posting updates; and the way the Facebook newsfeed works means that the more engagement your updates have, the more they’ll be shown to fans. Companies need to learn what type of content is most engaging, and how many of their fans are actually actively engaging with them every month, and Conversocial works that out for you.

How does it work?

Once a fan page has been added to Conversocial, it pulls in every user post or comment on that page (including comments on photos, notes and videos), and feeds it through a standard moderation flow. This lets a team of moderators know exactly what content has been seen and what is new, assign comments to clients to respond to, automatically flag up comments based on keywords, and keep a full workflow history. We help admins focus on the content that needs to be dealt with, and learn more about their fans.

We also give tools to help schedule updates to fan pages, and track their success – including a simple dashboard to see how well a page is engaging its fans.

What benefits can Conversocial offer its users?

There are three core benefits: increased brand (and user) protection through effective moderation and management of UGC content; increased engagement and reporting, resulting in increased distribution and take up of campaigns; and effective customer service on social platforms - and so, happier customers.

Firstly, moderation.  Unlike other moderation tools, Conversocial gives a full moderation flow for all user content on your fan pages - allowing you to moderate quickly and efficiently and work with clients. With our latest update, you can now annotate and assign escalated comments to other members of the team, or to the brand community manager.  You can see each user's comment history on your page (useful in making decisions to ban users) and there's a powerful search function.

Conversocial can moderate comments from photos and videos as well, as well as comments, which is really important - it can be used to moderate anything within Facebook's own API.  Right now, it can't moderate comments in bespoke apps from third party developers, but we’ll be releasing our own API later in the year so that any developer can plug their applications into Conversocial.

We've been working with the eModeration team (thanks!) to tweak the tool and provide aids to rapid moderation, which is imperative for high volume clients.  We know that some of your clients receive in excess of seven thousand comments per day, all of which need to be checked.  So we help by auto-flagging against a blacklist, and showing which words in the comments have triggered the flag. Moderators can tackle the flagged queue first as these will be the ones most likely to contain offensive content. We've built in time-saving tricks that you asked for too, like 'okaying' a whole page with one click.  You can set up auto-delete on a separate blacklist too - great to use when you get a bunch of spam containing the same string of text, for example, and you've got full control over the black lists, so they can be modified instantly.

Secondly, increased engagement and reporting. To be successful in Facebook, you need to have a highly engaged fan base. 85% of all engagement with pages happens in a users home page, in the newsfeed – so even if you have a million fans, they’re worth nothing if you’re not speaking to them. Once you do send an update, only a small percentage of your fans will see your update. However, if you have a large amount of engagement with your updates, Facebook will highlight them to your fans in the ‘top news’ part of the home page, increasing distribution and the hence the success of your promotions and campaigns. Facebook’s own reporting tools aren’t great here, but we apply our own metrics to help you learn what type of content is most engaging for your fans, and how many of your fans are actually engaging every month; we also provide tools to allow you to schedule updates for when your fans are most active.  Read more about this functionality on our blog.

Thirdly, customer support:  once you have opened the door for conversations on Facebook, customers will start to use it to try and get in touch with you to ask questions, and share negative feedback or complaints. Because of the public nature of fan pages, these type of posts represent an intersection between marketing and customer support. A great use of moderators is to use them to wade through the bulk of comments – which don’t need responses – so they can then assign any comments that do need responses to the relevant person with Conversocial. We’ll then send an email alert to the assigned admin, who can see the full conversation history with the user, any admin notes, and reply in-line. We’re currently working on integrating customer email databases to match up your customers with your Facebook fans, allowing customer support to take complaints and queries off-line; and permissions so that marketing can sign off on public responses before they go live.

Now for the bottom line.  What's your pricing structure Josh?

Our pricing is based on how much actual engagement you get across your fan pages. We want Conversocial to help you succeed in social platforms by increasing the amount of engagement you get from your fans, and our pricing reflects that. So, you only pay for the actual comments and posts you get from fans – regardless of how many pages you have or how many fans. We have a number of base packages available, starting at just £50/$75 per month for smaller clients (up to 1,000 comments and posts), with most current clients on £500/$750 per month (which covers up to 10,000 comments and posts); you can then set an overflow spending limit for comments over your base package. The bigger the base package, the cheaper it is per comment (similar to a mobile phone package). As this represents actual incoming items, this can cover many very big pages – even Starbucks, with 11m+ fans, only gets around 25,000 comments and posts per month.
The pricing is per account, which can include multiple pages. We offer pricing in both UK pounds and US dollars, and offer a 50% discount for registered non-profits.

Update Nov 2010: Conversocial have added an alternative pricing platform - the Enteprise Package, aimed at larger companies and agencies charges £100 - £150 per log in on a minimum of 10 seats, with unlimited pages and volume of messages.

Thanks very much for this Josh. To see how eModeration and Conversocial could help your Facebook page, feel free to get in touch.  

In the interests of non-biased reporting, I should point out that there are other Facebook moderation tools out there: for example, Context Optional and Vitrue for example, both offer Facebook moderation and CRM packages.