UGC moderation is a crucial step for any website that showcases user-generated content. It protects brands from negative publicity and helps them build a strong community.
Companies can use a combination of automated and manual moderation to filter images, video, audio, and text. Both have their advantages and drawbacks.
Inappropriate content can harm your brand’s reputation
UGC can make a brand seem more personal, but it’s also important to be careful about what you publish. Inappropriate content can harm your brand’s reputation, lead to a negative user experience, and turn away potential customers.
The best UGC is high-quality, created by real people, and compliant with your company’s policies, community standards, and legal regulations. It should also reflect your brand’s identity and voice. This type of UGC is often referred to as “quality UGC,” and it can help your marketing campaigns gain trust, relatability, and authenticity with consumers.
UGC moderation is a complex process, and it’s necessary for companies that want to keep their users safe and productive. It involves a multi-layered review of UGC, beginning with automated software and ending with professional reviews that use simple rules or complex algorithms. It also requires a deep understanding of the context surrounding the content and its impact on your users.
It can lead to a negative user experience
UGC can be a great way to connect with customers and drive brand advocacy. However, it’s important to have a moderation process in place to ensure that all user-generated content (UGC) is high-quality and complies with industry standards and regulations. This can help companies avoid potential lawsuits and negative publicity.
UGC moderation can include automated software, human moderation, and a combination of both. Automated software can filter out spam, weed out images with blurry content, and identify images that contain nudity or hate speech. Human moderators can focus on monitoring flagged posts and analyzing the context of questionable content.
Some sites experience a higher volume of UGC at certain times of day, which may require adjustments to the site’s content moderation. For example, a dating site may need to review more messages during the evening hours. UGC is also a key component of marketplaces in the e-commerce, automotive, and real estate industries. These platforms enable consumers to create and share their own product experiences with each other.
It can lead to a decline in engagement
UGC campaigns can be effective at creating a connection with consumers, but they must be properly moderated to avoid putting the brand in a bad light. This includes ensuring that the person behind the content is who they say they are, and following KYC procedures. It also involves avoiding the use of images containing illegal or disturbing content, which can cause anxiety for users. Automated tools can help with this by filtering images and flagging them for human moderation.
Some companies employ reactive moderation, which allows community members to flag content that they consider offensive through a reporting button. This approach comes with the risk that inappropriate content can go unnoticed, resulting in a decline in engagement. This is why it’s important to have a robust, automated moderation system in place, especially for sites that experience large volumes of UGC at specific times. This ensures that the site remains safe for users and meets regulatory standards.
It can lead to a loss of revenue
User-generated content can be a great tool to promote your business. It creates a more personal connection with customers, and it can also be used to build brand trust and generate new revenue streams. This type of marketing has the potential to replace traditional advertisements. Its authenticity helps to make it stand out in a world where consumers are choosing to bypass traditional ads.
There are two main ways to moderate UGC: automated moderation, which uses algorithms to flag inappropriate content, and manual moderation, in which humans look at each post before it goes live. Automated moderation is cheap and quick, but it can be prone to false positives (flagging posts that shouldn’t be flagged) and false negatives (allowing inappropriate content to appear on the site).
Human content moderation requires a bit more time and money, but it is crucial to ensure the safety of users. Choosing the right moderation method will help to grow your community and keep users engaged for a longer period of time.