Comment moderation is essential for growing a safe, active and happy community. Vigilant Instagram comment moderation maintains a friendly atmosphere. This encourages your followers to participate and engage with the community. With positive brand engagement, your dedicated following shields your brand’s online reputation from harm. Further, some brands have a lot to gain by going child-friendly.
Some brands may think moderating Instagram comments requires a big time investment. Others might worry about a large work load. You’ll be happy to learn that comment moderation doesn’t require either of these! Here’s how to easily keep your comment section in check.
Starting Out
Moderating Instagram comments may seem tough, but it’s actually easy. Your first job is to draw up a set of community guidelines. Instagram has their own set of rules, but you may want to make your own decisions on what can or can’t be said. For example, are you lax on profanity? Will you moderate for multiple languages?
Get your team together to decide on rules and brainstorm possible problematic topics that you can anticipate.
Instagram Comment Moderation Basics
In the past year, Instagram has made great improvements in offering tools for users to moderate Instagram comments on their posts. This includes options for automatically hiding problematic language. But first, let’s talk about stuff you can do manually.
If you see problematic content that you don’t want on your page, simply swipe left on it. This presents you with the option to delete or report it. If you see good content that you’d like to encourage, throw it a heart! This shows followers that you’re listening, and rewards good engagement.
Automatically Moderate Instagram Comments
Manually moderating is a good way to keep your community clean while you actively engage with it, but brands with large followings may find it tough to keep up. Thankfully, Instagram has introduced tools to help users who achieve high engagement.
To access these tools, go to Settings > Comments > Hide inappropriate comments. On this screen, you’re met with two keyword-based filtering options:
- Default keywords – This is a blacklist of English words developed by Instagram for blocking inappropriate language and profanity.
- Custom keywords – This tool allows you to set your own terms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for languages without spaces (like Chinese).
You can also turn off comments completely, but we don’t recommend it. Doing so turns your back on your community and shuts away precious data you can glean from it.
These keyword-based tools will work great for some users, but they have flaws. As mentioned already, you’re limited on languages you can moderate with them. Another issue is that if you turn the filter off, any previously hidden Instagram comments will be restored. Finally, keyword blacklists can be easy for trolls to circumvent.
A More Advanced Approach
Our comment moderation software is a great second line of defense in addition to Instagram’s native tools. Our tool is a machine learning-based AI. Because it can determine meaning behind a statement, it’s not reliant on keyword blacklists.
You can still use Instagram’s comment moderation tools, but using Smart Moderation simultaneously protects you from profanity and inappropriate comments in multiple languages. We’ll also erase comments just after they’re posted, permanently—so if you turn off the Instagram tool, you won’t be met with old abusive comments.
Let Us Know
How has your experience been moderating Instagram comments? Do you have a tip to share that we missed? Let us know in the comments below!
And if you’re just starting to build your Instagram community, we’ve got your back! Check out our guide to developing an Instagram community right here, and let us know how it goes!