If the content is king, user-generated content is the Emperor that holds power to fortify your brand recognition and trust amongst your users. However, there’s a catch: User-generated content must portray your brand appropriately. If not, it could badly damage the online reputation of your business. Here’s where content moderation becomes a necessity.
What is Content Moderation?
Content moderation is the process of reviewing and monitoring user-generated content as per platform-specific rules and regulations. The method uses automated hi-tech tools and human involvement to identify and eliminate inappropriate content and ensure compliance with the website’s laws.
In a nutshell, the prime objective of content moderation is to ensure the platform is safe and completely devoid of any content that makes the virtual environment unsafe for users.
Why is content moderation important?
The digital world is constantly changing as massive volumes of content are generated every second of every minute. In this scenario, platforms relying on user-generated content find it highly challenging to mitigate the risk of inappropriate content in various forms like texts, videos, images, and audio.
Without content moderation, digital platforms may lose the very purpose they are designed for.
Content moderation has become so prevalent that most digital platforms use content moderation in some way or the other based on their purpose. Let’s check out the details.
Content Moderation: Role & Significance Across 6 Digital Platforms
Platform-based content moderation rides on various factors, such as:
- Business Type
- Type of user-generated content
- Specifications of the user base
Based on these factors, here’s how content moderation impacts each digital platform.
1. Customer service
For customer service-oriented platforms, content moderation works in two ways: It protects employees from hostile customers and vice versa. In such cases, it is a wise strategy to deploy content moderation to:
- Prevent customer service staff from creating billing statements with questionable content.
- Prevent customers or staff from reacting offensively.
- Prevent customers from abusing representatives during live chat.
2. E-commerce platforms
E-commerce platforms enable small and large brands to reach a wider audience without spending too much on product promotion. Content moderation can help in increasing the platform’s search engine visibility. Additionally, the more user-generated content available on an e-commerce platform, the better the chances of a higher search engine ranking.
3. Gaming sites
Gaming sites are highly prone to inflammatory and abusive content that can flare up and spawn unwanted chaos within the gaming environment. Game developers rely on content moderators to keep out volatile content and to ensure a harmonious and competitive ecosystem that propels the site’s popularity.
4. Social media platforms
A sizeable chunk of the world’s population thrives on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. These platforms generated massive volumes of user-generated content that’s useful, informative, and interesting. However, these platforms are also significant sources of inappropriate content, sometimes potent enough to incite controversies. Content moderators watch what’s posted and block unwanted content before it becomes visible on the platform.
5. Image & video moderation
Imagery plays a significant role in boosting online interactions on digital platforms. In this context, content moderators have a major responsibility to ensure that:
- Users do not share pornographic, violent, or obscene videos or images.
- All images and videos are compliant with the platform’s rules and regulations.
- All imagery is monitored and categorized as per the guidelines.
Since the current business environment requires high quality and compliance, content moderation ensures everything is in order.
6. Media & entertainment
Nowadays, users can publish live videos and posts without waiting for a moderation team to analyze and approve them. As high-tech as its sounds, this practice is extremely risky as users can upload damage-inflicting content and sensitive video material that can damage the platform’s reputation within hours. In such cases, content moderation becomes a must, especially for media and entertainment platforms.
In essence, content moderators have their job cut out for them. Manual moderation in this digital era is out of the question. That’s why content moderators harness the power of AI-driven tools to determine the toxicity of a statement by placing it in its context.
A standard content moderation process starts with checking the user profile and other contextual factors and checking for using unusual terms. This process facilitates the classification of content accordingly. However, compliance is not the only output of content moderation. The process offers more benefits than you think. Here’s the list.
6 Amazing Benefits of Content Moderation for Digital Platforms
1. Ensures clean & appropriate content.
Creating and maintaining an online platform requires money, hard work, and time. A lot of thought process goes into establishing a platform, and a single incident of abusive and inappropriate content can render the entire platform unsafe. With moderation, you can keep your platform safe for users of all ages. Moderation also helps establish your platform’s purpose and protect its integrity.
2. Improves organic traffic and SERP rankings.
High-quality content pushes all the right buttons at the right time. It improves your online presence and visibility, bringing in organic traffic. As your user-generated content attracts more users, your website climbs the SERP rankings. All this is possible only with continuous and consistent content moderation.
3. Enhances customer and user understanding.
Content moderation makes it possible to identify user patterns, especially in high-volume campaigns. Moderators may assign tags to content with brand-oriented thoughts and attitudes in such cases. This information can later be used to gain insights into user behavior and opinion. Using these insights, you can also identify areas of improvement for your brand recognition.
4. Protects your brand reputation.
Even non-compliant, user-generated content can bring you unwanted troubles. Sometimes it may require nothing more than a derisive comment or an inappropriate image to damage your brand reputation beyond repair. However, content moderation can help you maintain your hard-earned reputation and create a positive and engaging environment.
5. Enhance your campaign effectiveness.
An effective content moderation program will help scale your promotion campaigns without negatively affecting your brand. For example, when running a contest to popularize your brand, it may become necessary to check video content posted by users. By doing so, you will not require extra staff for the moderation process.
6. Enhancing the user behavior and buying process.
We live in a digital age where traditional advertising tactics may not be enough to persuade or impact customer behavior. And if that’s not enough, users quickly block pop-up ads and auto-play videos with ad blockers. Content moderation serves as the ideal solution to create brand exposure. You can capitalize on user-generated content like buyers’ referrals and opinions to influence buying decisions and gently persuade customers to purchase your products.
Wrapping Up
Content moderation is gaining traction as more businesses worldwide realize these benefits. Content is not merely words, images, videos, or audio. Served in a well-formated structure, it has the potential to grow your business, boost your credibility, and strengthen your customer relationships. Therefore, it is critical that you invest in a reliable content moderation company like Opporture and ensure clean, compliant, and compelling content.
