Why is Content Moderation Important for User-Generated Campaigns

Social media platforms these days are like blissful paradise for modern marketers.

These platforms generate huge chunks of user-generated content (UGC) every minute and act as prime play spaces for marketers to execute their marketing & advertising campaigns and interact with the users in real-time. However, with great opportunities to interact with the customers and optimize their experiences, user-generated content also needs moderation so that the silver-lining between the healthy conversations between brands and customers or between the communities in general on social media and content violating the privacy policies or other social media norms is not breached. Similar to social media there are other platforms where users generate and which can fall prey to harassing and debilitating spammy content such as your business website, dating websites, photo and visual sharing platforms such as Imgur, all kinds of blogs, sports and EdTech websites and what not.

And, this is where content moderation becomes important for user-generated campaigns. The practice of content moderation is put to play to ensure that the user-generated content on several platforms across the web is created as per the guidelines of the various platforms so as to exclude any kind of spammy or abusive content. The moderation of content assures that no hate speech will be proliferated on the social media platforms, and the social communities will remain insulated from all kinds of obnoxious and restricted content. Content moderation is leveraged by organizations to ensure a trustworthy, professional, and safe environment for the exchange of information amongst social communities including but not restricted to the flow of information and healthy interaction between users and brands of their preference.

The content state of online spammy content is obnoxious. While online stalking and sexual harassment instances are at an all-time high, pewresearch.org has reported that about 40% of Americans have experienced some form of online harassment. According to a report by Guardian.com, a whopping 29.3 million images resonating only with child abuse was reported and removed across the internet in 2021.

Content moderation is a business ethics issue. If not moderated, spammy content is quite vigorous and often spreads sporadically, spoiling your brand image in seconds without even the slightest warning. When it comes to moderation of content different brands employ different strategies. While human intervention has been the most conventional approach, of late with the rise of artificial intelligence, immersive reality and other aligned technologies, the use of conversational AI is also becoming prevalent within the content moderation space. The most popular approach these days can be a hybrid model when AI can be used with a bit of human intervention and supervision to moderate user-generated content.

In this blog, we have covered some prime reasons why user-generated content is important in general and for user-generated campaigns in particular:

1. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

UGC moderation helps marketing strategies to curate the unfavorable content timely or solve the queries of the customers keeping them intact and happy through nonstop engagements. It is important for brand and reputation management with social engagements.

Content moderation helps companies to protect their brand and reputation in the market. These days, not just the big organizations, and well-known companies but also the small ones need to be more cautious about their brand image in the market. Brands of all shapes, sizes, and repute need to keep an eye on their official account on social media pages or across multiple platforms wherein they have registered their presence.

User-generated content (UGC) is raw, unfiltered, and authentic content on the internet, on social media platforms such as Facebook, and on review sites like Yelp. These user-generated reviews matter for an organization to gauge their product and service offerings to customers. UGC moderation helps marketing strategies to curate the unfavorable content timely or solve the queries of the customers keeping them intact and happy through nonstop engagements. It is not only important for brand and reputation management with social engagements in real-time but also optimizes the ORM framework for your organization in the long haul, provided it is done as an ongoing process. In addition to improving the image of your brand online, UGC moderation ensures that your followers engage with content related to your business and would allow you to create a personal connection with potential customers within a safe and trusted business atmosphere.

2. Emotional Analytics Can Help Decode the Sentiments of the Customers

Emotional analytics is a way of gaining deeper insights into customer reactions, preferences, and sentiments by examining the language used to describe products or services online. As content moderation keeps social media platforms and other channels of user-generated content distribution free of clutter and abusive stuff, the marketers are able to accurately decode the sentiments of the customers.

Leveraging content moderation allows companies to understand their audiences with the help of emotional analytical techniques that help them decode the sentiments of their customers. The feedback from the people is analyzed by Emotiq AI and machine learning algorithms so that marketers can know what exactly the audience needs from their brand and which kind of products or services are likely to succeed better than others.

These insights also help companies in various other ways -- from improving customer service to understanding what drives responses such as positive or negative feelings, trust, and more.

3. Protecting Audiences Against Spammy Content

With live content moderation service, the explicit and suggestive images and videos can be taken down immediately. This service helps a lot in protecting the majority of the population under age eighteen from exposure to such content. Also, adults stay away from watching these things publicly that really embarrass them in different situations. Such content when shared via user-generated campaigns can harm the reputation of brands even if the brand has got nothing to do with the creation of such content.

4. Reputation, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness Together Improve Your Organic Rankings

The positive impact of the moderated user-generated content always helps to improve the organic ranking of websites on search engines like Google. Content moderation also helps companies to solve queries of their audiences and helps them to provide genuine information about products and services. Google has an "E-A-T" (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) criteria to determine the quality of content.

After content moderation the content from user-generated campaigns ranks higher on the search-engine-result-pages (SERPs) as it is credible and non-spammy and authoritatively articulated to address the pain points of the customers, boosting the organic rankings.

5. Engaging with Constructive Critics and Optimizing their Experiences Results In Positive Brand Equity

Online reputation is becoming more valuable for businesses as they spend more and more of their time on branding. Trolling and criticism have now become a trend on social media and similar channels. Customers troll their service providers, even though they also do the same with individuals or well-known personalities. However, if there are some constructive critics that can help you learn and grow, you should work on optimizing their experiences. With the help of content moderators, this task gets easier. Once any such content is reported, a brand representative can get in touch with that particular customer quickly and can work closely with them to address their pain points. Many a time this might involve working to improve the quality of your products or services.

Content moderation is not just about keeping the negative reviews at bay but also about engaging with negative constructive reviews and working on converting them into positive ones. Content moderation is more about handling and moderating your content delivery across numerous channels and helps you to remain focused on the value that you deliver.

The best experts who support your business will thus engage with them constructively and optimize their experiences and results for positive brand equity.

6. Scaling the Online Campaigns

Content moderation is the need for an hour. When you have to inform your users about something, nobody will listen if they are filled with negative and/or spammy pieces of content. The purpose of online campaigns is not only limited to social media platforms but also helps to run an online campaign successfully. With user-generated content on the rise, it becomes more necessary for marketing teams to moderate them before they go viral as soon as they are launched.

Wrap Up

Content moderation enables organizations to remove offensive and inappropriate UGC before it's shared online. The process of content moderation involves a multi-layered review of user-generated content that begins with automated software. But the process does not end there. Professionals also conduct manual reviews and apply simple rules or complex algorithms depending on the type of content in question, as well as its context.

In order to use content moderation, you first need to create a set of rules that specify what kind of content you want to moderate. Then, you can select whether you want to filter UGC based on metadata like the size, format, or location of an image; its resolution or colors; or even its metadata such as keywords in text items. For instance, in an online store like Amazon, you might have a rule that says to filter out any images containing nudity; this rule could be applied across all customer reviews and product images.

These days, content moderation is required on multiple platforms across almost every industry (including but not limited to B2B Ecommerce, Travel & Accommodations, Retail and Online Marketplaces, and Forums and Communities) and social common podiums including several social media platforms, dating websites, photo, and visual sharing platforms, blogs and within the EdTech space.

The role of content moderators is to ensure that the content users upload and share on your site meets the rules you set up and is not offensive, obscene, or illegal. Content moderators are looking at a wide variety of content including images, videos, text, and audio files. It falls upon their shoulders to make sure your brand stays clean and positive.

We, at Valasys Media, are content crusaders and esteemed leaders trailblazing the realm of B2B Media Publishing. We employ an array of services to optimize your brand reputation and convert your potential buyers into paying customers. For more details, feel free to get in touch.