by Frank H on Thu 15 June 2017
Curating content and becoming an editor of your site, campaign, or event can be a time consuming process. Discovering and selecting which content gets space on your website is based on many factors, voices, and pressures. How do you quickly add a newly trending topic, or remove an item that mistakenly made it onto your social media wall?
We've helped marketers, design agencies, and event organizers deal with each of these scenarios, and have developed the Spotlyte platform to simplify this process. Publishers of all types effectively use Spotlyte for modern audiences. We'll briefly go over each of the features that simplify content curation and moderation in the Spotlyte platform in this article.
Moderating Content
The most basic form of moderation on Spotlyte is the banning of content. In the default configuration, content filters are created with a "approved by default" state meaning when the content is crawled and added to your Spotlyte it automatically appears on your public widget or display. You can then ban any content you want to hide from public view by hovering over the post with your mouse and clicking the "Ban Post" icon in the lower left corner of the post.
Another form of moderation, is approval moderation. In this mode, you configure your content filters with the "manually approve posts" checkbox enabled. Items that are crawled and fetched from these filters will require moderation before appearing on your public display. These posts are shown slightly darkened and with a yellow exclamation mark in your dashboard to indicate they need moderation before appearing on your display. Hover over any post and you will get icons to "Approve Post" so that it will be shown to your audience. You can also ban these un-moderated posts so that they don't clutter your dashboard.
This short video shows how ban and approval moderation works:
Using the Post Search dialog you can quickly search through all of your posts for un-moderated content. You can also use this dialog to search for previously banned posts in case you mistakenly banned something.
The ability to quickly sort through a lot of content is critical to any content curation tool enabling you to quickly create a cohesive story from trending news or user generated content.
Bulk Moderation
With the Post Search dialog, you can also perform bulk moderation. This saves you time by enabling you to ban or approve multiple posts with a single action.
Enter your search criteria into the Post Search dialog, then in the results panel, select the action that you want to be applied to all the resulting posts. See the following video for an example:
Automatic Rules Based Moderation
Our rules based moderation enables you to define certain rules that will automatically be applied to all content that is pulled into your Spotlyte. Any posts that violates any of the rules will automatically be banned, saving your team time from having to monitor and manually moderate content.
Rules include keyword matches which can be useful to prevent profanity from appearing on your wall. But is also useful in scenarios where you have a hashtag that might be used by some other organization and brand, and you can simply ban all their content based on keywords that might commonly appear in that brand's posts.
You can also ban certain users using their user names. This is helpful for users that might be spamming your hashtag or your accounts with irrelevant or spammy content.
Finally, you can ban posts based on how many mentions or hashtags they contain. Often times, posts with an excessive number of hashtags or mentions have a high likelihood of being spam. You can set the threshold of these values so that anything exceeding this will be banned.
Using the automatic rules based moderation can save your team a lot of time and headache in moderating and curating the content that arrives into your Spotlyte feed.
Filtering Content Based on Date
There are situations where you might want to limit your public content based on a timeframe. For example, for certain news sites or campaigns, it's only relevant to show recent items. In this scenario, it would be inconvenient to continually 'ban' items that are past your timeframe. And in fact, 'banning' would be entirely inappropriate in that case since this is content that is fact approved, but have just exceeded a timeframe.
For these situations, you can use the Display Editor's timeframe configuration to indicate that you only want the display to show items from the past day or past 3 days. Any items beyond that will not be displayed to the user. You can configure this once, and never have to worry about managing content solely based on dates.
In the Spotlyte Display Editor, expand the "Customize Content" panel and set the "Limit Posts To Time Frame" configuration.
Curating AdHoc Content
Content marketing has been shown to grow your brand. Spotlyte helps by making content discovery and aggregation simple, easy, and automatic. But also giving you a modern publication platform to select modern web and display themes to publish your curated content.
Often you'll discover content that doesn't match any of your configured filters. This maybe content that you read or discovered on the web, but is still highly relevant to your brand or campaign. You can quickly add this content to your social media display using the "Custom Post" feature. Just specify a URL and Spotlyte will automatically fetch all the relevant summary text, links, and images to add to your social media wall.
These custom posts can be edited after the fact, if the automatically fetched summary or image doesn't match what you expect. Simply click the "Advanced..." button in the Create Custom Post dialog and modify each individual field.
If you've added the Post already, you can simply open it back up for editing. Hover over the post, and in the lower right menu item of the Post select the "Edit Post..." menu item. This will open up a dialog to enable you to modify and customize each field of the Post.
Was this how-to helpful? Let us know what other features in Spotlyte you'd like to see explained in more detail. Read more about what to look for in your social media aggregator. Follow us on Twitter at @getspotlyte to find out other tips and tricks on succeeding as a content moderator on Spotlyte.