UGC moderation is an essential part of any business that offers a user-generated content (UGC) platform. It protects brands from online reputational damage and loss of trust by upholding community guidelines and legal standards.
Hate speech, graphic images or videos, nudity, spam, and scams interrupt the user experience, destroy community trust, and distract from your brand goals.
Quality
UGC moderation involves removing offensive, inappropriate content before it is shared online. This process may require manual review of photos or videos, or it may be automated with AI software. It also requires knowledge of cultural context and the ability to recognize Internet slang terms.
Having a high-quality UGC site is important for marketing campaigns because it can improve consumer trust and purchase intention. But if your UGC community is flooded with low-quality posts, it can backfire and damage the brand image.
Whether you use a team of humans or an automated platform, you need to set clear quality expectations and stick to them. This will help to reduce the time and cost of UGC moderation. You should also know the expected volume of UGC and how it changes during the day, based on the demographics and activities of your audience. Then, you can choose the best method for moderation. For example, if you anticipate that customers will post more reviews when a giveaway or contest is running, you can pre-moderate the submissions to speed up posting times.
Authenticity
Authenticity is a key factor for incorporating UGC into your marketing strategy. Customers want to know that you value their feedback and opinions. Incorporating UGC can help build trust, engagement, and even revenue for your business.
However, it’s important to remember that user-generated content must be monitored and moderated. This is because the content can be harmful, illegal, or offensive. A scalable content moderation process is necessary to ensure that only quality UGC is displayed on your website. This includes identifying and removing any images, video, text, or audio that may violate your company’s policies.
Unfortunately, the vast amount of UGC on the internet makes it difficult to filter out all unwanted content. Furthermore, users are adept at finding ways around automated filters. This can make it challenging for brands to maintain their authenticity. A few missteps can damage a company’s reputation and damage customer trust. Ultimately, this can be costly.
Transparency
Billions of people share text, image, video and audio content online every day. This creates tons of “digital garbage”. Some of it is inappropriate, insulting, obscene or even illegal. This content has the potential to cause harm and may spread quickly if left unsupervised.
It is important for UGC moderation to be transparent, so that users can see how the content has been moderated. Some companies choose to have a dedicated team of moderators that review all images and videos. Others are moving towards using automated tools to flag content that requires human review.
Choosing the right content moderation method for your business depends on a few factors. You need to decide how much quality matters to you, and how fast you want your content to be ready to go live. You also need to balance this with your budget (faster turnaround could mean more staff and a higher cost). Finally, you need to ensure that you can accurately verify any user-generated content that you are featuring on your website or social media.
Reputation
UGC is a great way to connect with your audience and build trust. It can also give you valuable insights into how your products are being used by customers and what needs improvement.
But, if your UGC isn’t well-moderated, it can have a negative impact on your reputation. UGC can include low-quality content, nudity, and hate speech that can be disturbing or offensive. In addition, it’s important to have a system in place to prevent people from circumventing filters to share inappropriate or illegal content.
To avoid these issues, make sure you get permission from content creators before using their UGC. This could be as simple as an email or a verbal OK. This will keep you in compliance with consumer protection laws and help ensure that your UGC is high-quality and authentic. You should also credit the content creator and provide links where possible. This will show that you respect their work and encourage them to continue posting.