Moderating a Facebook Group: How and Why
Moderating a Facebook Group: Why?
When it comes to starting a Facebook group, someone has to be able to moderate it. As Facebook admits itself, “people are different, but that’s what makes the world great. But those differences can sometimes cause misunderstandings, confusion, even controversy”. Sometimes members can have conversations that get heated and can get into intense arguments. It tends to be par for the course when you lump a group of people together.
Tips for Moderating a Group
There are many ways to moderate a Facebook group from small to big actions. It is important to keep the following things in mind when deciding how to moderate your group. A well-moderated Facebook group can allow the group as a whole to thrive and be its best self.
Make your Facebook Private or Public:
- Public: anyone on or off Facebook can see who’s in the group and what they post.
- Private: only members can see who’s in the group and what they post. In a private group, the group can also be hidden so people can only be invited via invitation.
Create Group Rules:
· When you are creating rules, you want to make sure they are things that people will be able to follow and they will be beneficial to your group. Facebook Group Rules can be anything from no bullying or hate speech to no self-promotion or spam. You can also vet your members by asking them to agree to the group rules when they are joining. By creating these rules, it will be easier to keep a happier and safer group.
Create an Admin Team:
· When your group becomes too big, you can recruit other members to help you out by moderating new members and posts. This takes the pressure off of a single moderator and allows a closer look at all the posts and members.
Moderating Individual Posts:
· It is important to moderate posts because they can sometimes get off-topic or can start and argument of fight.
· You can set up alerts within your Facebook Group to make sure you are aware of any possible arguments or threats. When you set up alerts, Facebook will flag and alert you to certain keywords that you want to keep an eye out for.
· If a post becomes problematic, you can delete the post with a warning, close off the comments so no more people can comment, delete any comments that might be harmful to members, remove or block a specific member that is causing issues within the post or give a member a temporary ban where the person will remain a member but can’t post or comment.
When creating my Facebook group, there were a few things I had to make sure I kept in mind. I wanted to create a safe space where people were allowed to share their thoughts and feelings without being bullied or threatened. Since my group is location based and surrounding women, safety also became my first priority. When it comes to posting about meet-ups or locations, it is one of my group rules to make sure no one shares any specifics about their address or meeting up in a dangerous situation. My final rule is to not self-promote or become too spammy. The goal of the group is to create relationships and that can’t happen if people are self-promoting the entire time. Now that these rules are in place for my Facebook group, I can follow all the tips above to make my group the best it can be.
