90% of the customers share their experiences about a brand or business on the web. Such content is freely shared on platforms like youtube, facebook, instagram and X.
The users do not always post a comment, review, photo, or video sincerely and responsibly. The reputation of a brand or business can be harmed by what people, as they share their negative experiences. While authentic negative UGC can be managed, it’s the fake news, which needs filtration and inhibition.
This is why user-generated content moderation is necessary here.
With effective content moderation, brands can filter posts and other media according to predefined policies. It helps brands maintain and manage their reputation by staying respectful, genuine, constructive, and safe.
Additionally, content moderation contributes to a positive user experience, which is beneficial for businesses. Here are some tips to help you learn how to moderate user-generated content.
Workings of User-Generated Content and its Importance
Any content created by customers of a product or users of a service is characterized as UGC. From a product review to an image of using the product to a discussion on a forum or a video on YouTube showing its side-effects, benefits, etc., is user-generated content.
UGC can be positive or negative. Brands can leverage the positive ones to improve customer engagement and attract new customers. A perfect example of positive UGC is customer testimonials, which can highly influence potential customers. It is vital for brands to understand how to effectively gather and utilize these testimonials. For more insight on this, Vocal Video, a known authority in the field, offers a comprehensive guide to customer testimonials, providing you with all the necessary tools and strategies. For negative content, brands can address it as well through mindful interactions with the customer or content moderation.
Content Moderation at a Glance
Content moderation is the process of filtering content that is not suitable for the audience to see and interact with. It can be abusive language, images, video, and audio content that is unsafe for anyone to see. Overall, it’s the process to ensure that any form of content online aligns with a brand’s values and community standards.
Users monitor and manage the content posted online. However, when 3.7 million videos come up on YouTube daily, and 500 million tweets are sent daily, it’s impossible for humans to monitor all this content. This is where artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are used to speed up the process.
How Content Moderation Helps Brands and Businesses?
Content moderation is a multifaceted process with extensive applications for improving user’s digital experiences. Today, marketing is not limited to the mass media. It’s more about community involvement and personalization.
Brands create only 25% of the content for themselves, whereas the rest 75% is created by the users. Hence, brands and businesses need to focus on increasing engagement here and allow their community to become brand ambassadors.
- Address Users Through UGC: It is understood that any brand cannot keep everyone happy and satisfied over the internet. But they can surely make amends wherever they can and even apologize if needed.
Brands like Burger King, Amazon, etc., are quick to respond to a comment or post by a user, which may put them in a bad light. However, addressing the user’s query or issue publicly allows brands to be responsive and responsible.
- Manage Brand’s Online Reputation: With loads of diverse content published online, not all content will be positive and safe for everyone. Hence, with content moderation, you can protect your users from accessing content that negates community guidelines. Content moderation helps brands maintain a positive user experience.
- Understand Customers Through Online Content: When content moderators go through user generated content, they get an overview of the brand’s community. It will help learn more about the end-user’s response towards products. This is a good way to personalize user experiences and harness their sentiments to provide unique offers to potential customers.
- Build and Grow Brand’s Online Community: Content moderators facilitate relevant and brand-related conversations over the web. Where they are filtering content to create a safe space for everyone, they are also helping to create an engaging forum or online discussion, which improves brand visibility.
How to Achieve Success with User-Generated Content Moderation?
Every brand faces fierce competition in their industry. Hence, customer engagement and creating positive customer experiences is pivotal for a brand to achieve success. The online space is giving businesses the opportunity to focus on direct-to-customer engagement. Here are a few ways to become better at UGC content moderation;
- Set Moderation Standards: Be specific about what sort of content is acceptable and unacceptable for your brand. Go deep into the linguistics, behavior, and types of posts you want your customers to engage with.
- Do Frequent Monitoring: With the vast amount of content generated every day, you cannot pause the monitoring process. Using AI and ML capabilities or outsourcing the work can help you monitor content continuously.
- Combine Manual plus AI: Don’t exclusively rely on automated AI tools and human moderations. Where AI can process the information faster, human moderators are required to understand content from a human perspective.
- Approach Negative Comment With Positivity: All negative UGC is not harmful to the community. So, have an objective approach here and learn to find the difference between criticism and constructive criticism. Some negative content can be taken as feedback and used to improve products and services.
Effective user-generated content moderation is essential to create a productive digital space for customers. Using content moderation techniques, brands can elevate their reputation by enhancing customer experiences.
Conclusion
The quantum and frequency of user-generated content is going to increase in the coming years. Customers today have access to innovative tools, allowing them to know everything about a brand. Where engaging with existing, new, and potential customers is essential for a brand, monitoring and moderating content is pivotal to creating a positive image.
At Shaip, we provide content moderation services to our clients, ensuring zero existence of negative and abusive content online about their brands and businesses. Get in touch with us to take care of your content moderation services and help your business deliver safe user experiences.
Author Bio
Guest author: Vatsal Ghiya is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in healthcare AI software and services. He is the CEO and co-founder of Shaip, which enables the on-demand scaling of our platform, processes, and people for companies with the most demanding machine learning and artificial intelligence initiatives.