When it comes to streaming sports events, you should prioritize your fans, who turn out to be the lifeblood of engagement. However, there comes a time when passion for sports shows the way for aggression, and ultimately, online abuse. This explains why successful sports websites and OTT platforms have devised powerful means to keep their fans’ comments in check.
After all, differences in opinion might crop up, given that you would have live chat features on your platform. You should manage social interactions carefully and handle negative ones accordingly on your website, as they can damage your brand image. With proper comment moderation, your fans would learn to respect each other.
Sports activities bring about some of the most charged-up moments for your fans. Although the heat of the moment might drive emotions high, it makes sense to maintain decency on your platform to retain community members.
Community engagement experts at Viafoura, for example, provide a great look at how you can use software tools to moderate comments and content generated by users. In this post, we’ll give you a better idea of how you can prevent moments of excitement from turning ugly.
Why Moderate Fans’ Comments While Streaming Sports Events?
Most sports platforms deploy live chat as an interactive mechanism to boost engagement and user participation. Through this feature, fans enjoy the liberty to interact and ramp up their overall experience.
For many years, sports enthusiasts have enjoyed sports broadcasts with their family members or friends, particularly in select public settings like pubs and bars. As the next step up through advances in society and technology, live stream chats also empower fans to engage with like-minded people with enthusiasm no matter how much distance is between them. Over the last decade, the use of social media to stream sports events has accelerated significantly.
Clearly, sports fans now enjoy the freedom to comment, interact with others, and come up with questions. However, the lack of apparent boundaries in this freedom sometimes messes up the experience of loyal users or followers. This underlines the importance of moderating fans’ comments during live streaming sports events.
Excessive rage or passion for sports might also influence die-hard fans to misbehave or abuse others. For the sake of maintaining your community standards, moderating fans’ comments turns out to be imperative, even across a digital medium.
Grow Your Audience With A Professionally Moderated Online Chat
Talking of live streaming, you cannot possibly overlook the chat feature. In fact, this particular feature reminds your fans that you are actually live. Without the use of a chat feature, your audience might as well be watching a TV broadcast or recorded playback of the game. User interactions with each other ultimately drive the value of live broadcasts.
- With the live chat feature, you can actually grow your audience. This feature can enable you to engage with a larger audience, answering their questions and drawing relevant insights from their comments.
- It’s a good idea to allow the fans to engage in productive conversations with like-minded people. As the live stream platform or OTT owner, you can benefit from this intense engagement. After all, it’s your responsibility to deliver a cohesive and warm experience to the participants and viewers.
- You can turn your platform into a safe and engaging place for fans to interact by establishing community standards and having professional moderation in place. Moreover, live chat features also support emojis and file sharing, which are popular aspects of audience engagement and interaction.
With proper moderation, the users would feel safe participating on your platform and return to your website time and again. By far, the OTT owner should shoulder the responsibility of cultivating the desired culture of the brand into the users.
Moderating Comments While Live-Streaming An Event
Here’s a complete list of tips that would help you moderate the comments of fans when you live stream a sports event.
1. Hire A Chat Moderating Team
Make sure to work closely with a chat moderating team before going live. With these moderators keeping an eye on the comments section, they can swiftly flag offensive comments and delete them.
Besides, you should empower the moderators to take corrective measures against routine offenders. This allows the broadcaster to carry out the live stream without worrying about moderation, and you can keep spam and sensitive comments away from your platform in the process.
2. Establish Chat Rules For Your Platform
Being a responsible livestream broadcaster means you need to consult chat moderators and draw up specific rules guiding the chat. This way, your audience would have a clear idea of what is permitted on your platform and what is not.
As a rule of thumb, sports platforms prohibit spam in the comments. Along with this, you need to keep an eye on hate speech, sharing of personal information, affiliate links, and repeated texts.
The chat rules should prohibit the users from promoting themselves and establish punitive norms for the offenders, including a ban, if necessary. To top it all off, your users should be aware of these norms before they attend any of your events, so make sure your chat rules are available for review somewhere on your website.
3. Block Certain Terms Or Words
In an effort to maintain decency on your platform, make sure that your audience does discuss inappropriate subjects. Try to block certain terms or words so that comments containing these words do not go public or are flagged for review before they get posted.
You can deploy relevant tools alongside your moderation staff to analyze user sentiments and draw a line against vulgarity. Besides, these tools would guide you in preventing sensitive speech and insults on your platform.
4. Reviewing Inappropriate Comments
You may need to think of a mechanism beyond the list of prohibited words at times. In these cases, you need to deploy automatic filters. This lets you prevent offensive comments from coming into public view and prevent others from replying to the comment. Instead, the moderators would get an opportunity to review the comment. They might reject the comment and block the user if it disrespects the chat rules.
Endnote
Although you would not want to impose a ban on your fans, there might be instances when you need to resort to extreme measures. Amidst all the responsibilities like creating engaging content and broadcasting sports events, it might be intimidating for you to moderate the comments. This explains why you need to collaborate with professionals to have a proper comment moderation system in place.
