The online world works with a huge amount of content daily, and content moderation is of utmost importance. As many users have started generating and posting content online in audio, video, image, and text, content moderation has become the need of the hour. Primarily, as brands use the content generated by the users as a part of marketing campaigns, regular inspection helps maintain the brand value.
User-generated content moderation or UG content moderation is the process by which the content uploaded by the users is reviewed to see if they abide by certain internet rules. A license to share posts on social media does not mean that any content is acceptable. A lot of what people share is purely illegal, insulting, and inappropriate. These have to be monitored before they cause disrespect to brands or specific groups.
Is User-Generated Content Important?
User-generated content can be a great way to speak out loud about your brand without actually doing any real work. Much of the work is done by the users who post reviews or testimonials of the brand, which can be used for marketing campaigns. Implementing UGC can be beneficial in the following ways.
Attract new users: A section of the audience is hard to reach and may not be convinced by the regular ads or banners. But they might get influenced by users on social media who are known for their authentic content. If these influencers support your brand, your job is done. They build content that finds a way to new customers.
Better rankings in search engines: Unlike normal marketing campaigns, user-generated content can up the brand's search engine rankings. Users may unknowingly use keywords that are unlikely to be used otherwise. This could make up for an array of words close to what the real users are searching for, and will improve rankings in search engines.
Makes the existing customers happy: Retaining the current customers is as important as gaining new ones. UGC has the power to engage the customers in innovative ways. For example, when you share UGC on your brand page, it is like an appreciation to the content creator, building trust. And customers place a lot of trust in the opinions and reviews of other customers, which impacts their purchasing decisions.
Make Optimum Use Of UGC With Social Media Moderation
Social media content moderation puts the brand in a place where you are safe enough to be exposed to consumers devoid of any inapt content in your pages. The process includes supervising users' images, text, video, and audio to eliminate toxic terms or comments. Let us see how the statistics of user-generated content looks like. This gives a picture of how many videos, images, etc. are shared on social media in a single day.
- Twitter: 500 million tweets
- Facebook: 350 million photos
- Snapchat: 5 billion snaps
- Instagram: 95 million photos and videos
- YouTube: 500 hours of video uploaded every minute
This data stresses the need to monitor user content regularly. Here is how social media content moderation can be of help.
Understand The Customers
Going through the user content can assist in understanding if there is a general pattern that is followed unknowingly. In addition, content with certain attitudes towards the brand can be highlighted and kept for reference in the future. This can aid in taking actions that improve your brand, thus changing the overall opinions of users to work in your favor.
Up The Quality Of Brand Campaigns
Marketing campaigns that include user-generated content are found to penetrate more into the audience. A well-planned moderation by content moderation services can better the quality of movements without any negative impact on your brand's reputation.
The method you adopt for moderation must be scalable so that there is enough knowledge to review the content irrespective of whether they are images, videos, or anything else.
Better Online Visibility
Research shows that 25% of the search result pages of large brands are from UGC links. This shows the importance of user-generated content. However, you have to make sure that no offensive content could do the opposite of what you expect.
This means that a content moderation services team must constantly be on their toes to see that only appropriate user content is published on your website. As this can draw effective traffic to the brand.
Acts As A Shield To Your Brand And Users
Proper moderation ensures that the posts are respectful of the values and vision of the brand.
Users can post anything in their hearts, but moderators can do the edits to align them with what the brand believes in. This can also protect the users from any bullying they might otherwise face.
Good To Build Better Relations With Users
Your brand can have first-class relations with customers if their content regularly appears on the brand pages. The moderators can make the content incredible so that the brand itself becomes approachable and authentic. This promises an expansion of your brand's followers.
Shape The Purchasing Behavior For Good
Today, the only way to reach a potential buyer is through user-generated content. Learning from experiences, people are searching for customer reviews or referrals before they make the buy. So the content that goes through content moderation can shape the purchasing behavior of users to maximize sales.
Implementing UG Content Moderation
Moderation filters the user-generated content to project those posts that go well with the brand image. Of course, it could be a hassle to find the best content from among the massive user content out there. But keeping the following things in mind can make implementing social media content moderation worth doing it.
Be Clear About The Rules
There must be a set of rules that define what can be accepted by the company and what cannot be. Be strict with disgusting or illegal content in any way, like something that involves bullying or violence. An important tip is to add spam content once in a while. This could be any post that questions the worth of the brand or anything similar. Deleting all such content may not build the best relations with customers. So include them and consider them as feedback upon which your business can improve.
Outline The Process Of Submission
The content moderation services you hire must help create a submission process that answers the how's and what's of user-generated content. First, get an idea about the three approaches to submitting content. In the pre-moderation, you can review all content before it gets published. You can also include a message that says, 'Your post has been successfully submitted for review'
In the post-moderation, you can post the submitted content in real-time and keep a routine check. In reactive moderation again, you will be posting the content in real-time and review them only if other customers have some issues with the published content.
Adhere To Certain Restrictions
Having some restrictions is a good way to moderate the user content efficiently. For example, you may ask the users to have an account before posting anything on your website. You can even restrict very new users from posting anything at all. Once they are acquainted with the brand and trust is built, these restrictions can be lifted.
Keep An Eye On Pages With UGC
With content flocking in regularly, it becomes imperative to check the pages that have UGC. Whether you do the moderation with in-house resources or take help from content moderation services, there are some top-notch moderation methods you can resort to. Regular monitoring safeguards the brand reputation along with giving space for your brand to grow.
Link The Marketing Goals With Great User Experiences
Linking the marketing goals with content moderation can go a long way in brand promotion. There must be a way to make the best use of user-generated content that creates the best user experiences in the process.
- These are some of the best practices.
- Make the permissions and rights agreement available to the users
- Be clear about how to use the user content
- State all the rules, including submission deadlines
- Associate a strong call to action for submissions
One clear example is an Australian brand that boomed to become an international favorite product with more than 10,000 brand images shared on Instagram. From the start, the brand used the same hashtags #letsbefrank and #thefrankeffect for all their UGC content and made sure that all their UG pictures had the same quality and color theme.
Include contact information
Additionally, you can make the customers aware of what the brand expects from UGC. For this, you can give examples from other submissions and use branded hashtags that are consistent across all online platforms. It is also good to reward the users by featuring on your website, giving gifts and promotional discounts, and any other way you feel appropriate.
Types of Content Moderation
Human-Based Content Moderation
This method involves people monitoring the user-generated content for data that can threaten the brand image. You can implement this model either through an in-house team monitoring the content or outsourcing the work to content moderation services.
Though this method is quite reliable, there are a few issues that cause concern. It is not a good thing when moderators are scanning harmful content daily. Other issues include manual social media content moderation being expensive, speed of moderation not being able to keep up with the rate of content generation, privacy issues, etc.
AI Content Moderation
AI content moderation is powered by visual recognition algorithms that promise the most efficient ways of screening content. They can work with massive data in real-time, giving little scope for errors. In addition, they are experts in recognizing harmful visuals in the content, including mass fights, pornography, weapons, horror, and much more that can have undesirable results when published.
The main con associated with AI content moderation services is the lack of contextual understanding in some instances. For example, a video showing how military personnel are trained in various weapons can be interesting for the masses. But when shared by a user, this video can be filtered by the AI-powered moderation citing that the video contains weapons and fighting.
A Hybrid Approach: AI + Human Moderation
Combining human intelligence and AI algorithms can be a great option to screen loads of content being generated every day. The algorithms can monitor most of the content and send just a part of it for manual moderation. This makes way for greater productivity, a lesser workload for moderators, and can be largely cost-saving.
The algorithms are useful to remove objectionable content in a general sense. The reviewed content can be again moderated manually to see if it adheres to the guidelines of the brand.
Do You Think Your Brand needs Content Moderation?
As already discussed, the benefits of content moderation are endless. Going with the statistics, the online world will be spammed with posts if a proper monitoring system is not in place. Implementing social media moderation can be done effortlessly if the brand knows what content it supports and what is not acceptable.
Still, confused if UG content moderation is beneficial for you or not? Well, you must know that websites or campaigns with UGC results have a 29% more conversion rate. In addition, a whopping 5.4 hours is spent by users every day with UG content; this shows the importance of having content moderation for your business.
As a business, you can go with any UG content moderation method that suits your interest and budget. Call Wow customer support today to create better customer engagement and build brand credibility with our content moderation services. Get the best content moderation for apps, blogs, forums, and social media to have content that complies with your business policies.
