Social media communities evidently play a crucial role in a business’s marketing and audience development strategies. However, building and running such a community comes with its share of challenges, one of them being the creation of community guidelines. Laying down a definite set of guidelines is indispensable to running an online community smoothly, since in the absence of guidelines, plenty of things can go wrong.
Organizations have to be extremely careful when setting up the guidelines for their online community. After all, the community guidelines play an indirect role in determining how your audience perceives the organization. Your guidelines may make you appear to be strict, laid back, sassy, or even show that you have a sense of humour. Ultimately, it all becomes a part of the brand image and personality.
With that said, you definitely need to figure out how to create and present the guidelines for your online community. Click here to get some additional recommendations on what to consider when drafting your community’s rulebook.
Do’s and don’ts to remember when creating community guidelines
If the concept of creating community guidelines is new to you, you might find this task to be particularly daunting. After all, you cannot set guidelines simply based on your whims without considering their impact on the community and your brand. One should always take a thoughtful and analytical approach, keeping in mind how the guidelines can affect the community’s functions.
Do’s
Let us first take a look at what you should do when creating community guidelines.
1. Start with a mission statement
Start the community guidelines with a mission statement, i.e., a formal summary of the community’s goals and general purpose. This involves mentioning exactly what the community exists in the first place and what your organization hopes to achieve with it. Reflecting your organization’s aims and values through a well-articulated mission statement will give members and visitors a better idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not.
2. Keep it simple
Remember to keep the language simple and easy to understand. Your priority is to ensure that everyone can easily read and understand the guidelines. Of course, depending on the scope and the brand image you are trying to put up, you may give the guidelines a special twist. As long as you avoid using complex jargon and phases, it should be fine.
3. Allow easy user access
Make sure that the users can easily view the community guidelines in the first place so that they have no way of not knowing that they’re expected to stick to specific rules. You may place an easily visible link to the community guidelines page on the forum or even include it in the welcome emails. Also, members should be able to report violations to your moderation team seamlessly. Tell them about who to reach out to or how to file a report if they find someone breaching the guidelines.
4. Use advanced tools
Community moderation has become much easier in recent times, thanks to the emergence of various AI-powered tools. If you can afford to invest in these modern tools, detecting and mitigating guideline violations will be much easier. AI can efficiently filter and remove toxic or otherwise unacceptable content from the community forums. This will make the moderation team’s job much more manageable.
However, make sure that the members can request a review if they feel their comments or content was unfairly removed. After all, AI can make mistakes and accidentally flag content that actually does not violate the guidelines.
Don’ts
Avoid making the following mistakes when you present and enforce the community guidelines:
1. Over-moderation
While you need to moderate the content and the discussions in the community, be careful not to over moderate. It is okay for people to have different opinions, and debates are actually good as long as they don’t turn toxic. Being excessively strict with the guidelines can make the community a dull place and cause people to leave. All you have to do is know when to step in and remind the members to respect each other and adhere to the guidelines.
2. Ambiguity
Make sure to be absolutely comprehensive and clear when setting up the guidelines. Laying ambiguous guidelines can lead to different members understanding them differently and potentially violating them. For instance, instead of simply asking members not to make derogatory comments, also mention what type of comments count as derogatory. This will give them a far more precise idea of what kind of conduct is acceptable within the community.
3. Inconsistency
When you lay down guidelines for the community to follow, you should be consistent in enforcing them too. Of course, there may be gray areas where you have to handle issues on a case-by-case basis. However, being lenient towards certain members while penalizing others for the same offence won’t go down very well with the community. Not following through with the penalties can also imply that members can violate the guidelines and get away with it.
4. Repressing negative feedback
Especially when you build a large community, it’s possible that not every member may agree with all the guidelines. In case they come up with any negative feedback, do not repress their opinions. Instead, ask them how they feel you can improve the guidelines and consider whether you want to make the changes they suggest. After all, you can always reject their suggestions if you don’t feel like implementing the changes.
Endnote
Enforcing the right community guidelines and being vigilant about their enforcement is crucial in running a healthy community. Failing to do so would prevent the community from growing, as members would leave a poorly moderated community relatively fast. Considering the importance of the community behind the brand’s success, you certainly wouldn’t want this to happen.
Check out what experts recommend about the implementation of community guidelines. It’s always a good idea to consult experienced professionals and hire community managers to enforce and discuss your community guidelines.