In a nutshell, content moderation exists to monitor and regulate user-generated posts by implementing a set of pre-arranged rules and guidelines. Keeping tabs with audience activities is relative in all types of social platforms, digital communities when it comes to moderating content meaning that the main objective is the same.
From text-based content, ads, images, profiles, and videos to forums, online communities, social media pages, and websites, the goal of all types of content moderation is to maintain brand credibility and security for businesses and their followers online.
According to the Data Bridge Market Research report, the global content moderation solutions market is set to grow at a CAGR of 10.7% by 2027.
A scalable process of managing different online communities is highly important for brand and user protection especially for businesses that run a high amount of campaigns and are looking into expanding their online network of supporters.
Customers hold more power and influence than they think.
This explains why visual content, social platforms, and review websites have made end-user posts among what customers regard as credible and trustworthy sources for when they want to learn more about a particular company or service.
Get a call backEach content moderation process can be executed either by hiring individuals to manually check user posts or employing the aid of artificial intelligence. It is dependent on the following:
Ideally, there should be a guideline that enumerates the scope and limitation of regulating content submitted by users. For instance, a brand or client specifically prohibits the use of words or terms related to terrorism along with phrases that imply sexual activity. Individuals in-charge of keeping an eye on posts from followers and online community members will use this as a basis to determine which types of moderation methods are applicable to use.
Each post is carefully reviewed so that moderators decide what content to allow from those that should be banned or require further scrutiny. User Content that is downright offensive and in violation of the community guidelines are deleted by moderators.
Aside from human-powered moderation, artificial intelligence can also be utilized to improve how online platforms, communities, and business websites are managed and regulated. Since its development, AI has revolutionized content moderation definition for communities receiving massive volumes of user content.
AI-powered moderation uses machine learning to deliver accurate inspection of user-generated content. Machine learning for moderating content refers to the process of assigning and inputting a group of information such as keywords, phrases, words, sample images, or videos and posting rules to the AI moderator. The collection of information and references is also referred to as the base model.
AI moderation requires extensive base models because unlike human moderators, it has limited capabilities in terms of judging and determining user intent when sharing content. It will only function based on what it is programmed to monitor and assess.
As found by AdWeek, 85% of users are more influenced by user-generated content as compared to content published directly by the brands themselves. Here’s how popular brands suffered because they failed to secure essential checks and content moderation.
Selling or Promoting fake or imitated products
In December 2019, Economic Times reported that HUL is taking Snapdeal to court for selling fake products. The official complaint held Snapdeal’s founder liable for selling fake products.
Similarly Club Factory, another e-commerce marketplace got in trouble for selling imitated products online. Big brands are constantly looking for platforms and sellers that are pushing first copies of their imminent products hence e-commerce players need to adapt content moderation and weed all such duplicate products out.
Maligning brand reputation
Tik Tok, a short video-sharing social media platform from China got in trouble in the United States when a bunch of teenagers used it to create politically motivated videos.
In recent times, the brand suffered heavily when netizens started to rate it 1 star on Google Play Store. Only if they had content moderation in place and had deleted politically motivated posts before it went viral, they would have avoided a hell of a lot of hassle.
Abuse platform for political Gains
Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and popular e-commerce stores have suffered at the hands of political agents. While Cambridge Analytica accessed the personal data of over 50 million people to influence the US presidential election, e-commerce stores in Bangladesh were used to sell merchandise that carried hate messages.
Content moderation is essential for building customer loyalty between the company and its potential customers. When customers feel valued, they are more likely to open up about what they think about your product or services and trust that they will be heard.
Content categorization for personalization
In addition to keeping your customers safe from harmful content, a great way to boost customer satisfaction is to personalize their experience. Content moderation also involves content categorization where a moderator accurately tags and categorizes content based on specific demographics, interests, and market behavior. Through content categorization, online businesses display relevant content to the right market for a better online experience. For instance, a baby shampoo ad wants to target women ages 25 to 40 who have babies and toddlers. They want to personalize it even further by targeting mothers who have recently looked for the best and safest baby shampoo brands in the market. Content categorization works by tagging these types of adss in detail to match the right audiences.
Content moderation for market Intelligence
Another benefit of content moderation is your moderation teams can go through user-generated content and gather information such as opinions, reviews, and responses towards your products or services. A lot of businesses take advantage of this ability to gain valuable market intelligence to be able to come up with improved campaign strategies, unique offers, and ultimately develop better products and services.
Brand perception influences potential customer decisions with a great deal. These potential customers form opinions quickly about brands when they read an online review, hear a friend’s experience, or see a news story mentioning a specific brand. By becoming aware of what is being talked about regarding your brand, you can start to understand the factors, good or bad, that make you stand out.
Social media monitoring
Every brand today is active on social media as it is a necessity. Your social media pages are filled with user comments and posts. While most of them are as per the guidelines of social media content norms, others can include false and hateful content. It could also contain content in the form of photos and videos that do not comply with the platform’s guidelines.
Content moderation services manually go through all the user-generated content on your various social media pages and moderate them accordingly to ensure that your followers can communicate freely in a positive social media environment.
Comment moderation
It is great to encourage your website or forum visitors to engage with you by leaving comments about your articles or your products/services. This makes customers and potential customers feel like they have a voice and are being heard. There are however several comments that may be spam or against the content submission guidelines.
Content moderation outsourcing, you can verify every single comment submitted on your site or forum before them being approved and published. Follow the strict guidelines laid out by you to ensure only the relevant content makes it to your site.
Video moderation
We are moving towards a video dominated internet and the videos published on your site mustn’t contain any obscenity, sexually graphic content, or violence. What brands need today are user-generated videos made live as quickly as possible, without compromising on quality and rules.
Video moderation services are capable of monitoring thousands of user-generated videos daily and tagging them into relevant categories and disapproving videos that do not meet the guidelines on a set of predefined parameters.
Image moderation
Images play a major role online and are the best way to attract new users onto the site. Inviting users to share images is a great way to boost online interactions. A major challenge when you allow image sharing is moderating those images to ensure they do not contain any explicit content or visuals that may not be suitable for that online platform.
Through image moderation services, a team of moderators will review every image to ensure both quality and compliance as per your guidelines.
Categorizing & indexing
Categorize all business offerings in an organized and delightful manner for better site search-ability, navigation, and faster conversions and sales. Businesses formulate appropriate classifications to index products/offerings efficiently. The moderation comes with cataloging services designed to convey your message to your customers.
Product data entry
Any website or app with proper search functionality always becomes user-friendly the minute your customer engages with it. From product specifications, tagging offerings with optimized keywords, to ‘related items’ listing; It allows you to enhance your website/app customer experience, providing them all essential information and more.
The large number of data being generated by users makes it nearly impossible for humans to moderate content on their own. AI has solved this puzzle to a large extent. The most modern approach to content moderation is a mix of AI & human-moderation, where AI systems take care of most of the conventional workload.
With COVID-19 pushing people to stay at home, moderation works have suffered. Due to legal, privacy, and security issues, not all types of content can be accessed from home by the content moderators. Artificial Intelligence systems for content moderation are finding rapid adoption bound to the non-availability of human-moderators.
Let us learn how the AI content moderation system works in tandem with human-moderators.
Human-moderators bring social context into the moderation process. They know the psychology behind the content because they understand the type of users they are working with. Because there is always a grey area of moderation where it is impossible to declare the content as simply offensive or completely harmless; it depends on the context. This is where the expertise of human-moderators comes into play.
You mean, on top of my daily engagements as a business owner, I have to manage my brand’s online reputation as well?
Yes.
Whether your brand has a website or not but for your business’s sake content moderation is one of the regular, important activities of smart entrepreneurs worldwide. Because the effectiveness and prosperity of your brand’s online reputation management largely depend on it. And allowing fake and negative user-generated content to drip into your website or social media channels for all the world to see and more importantly, struggling to address it suitably and promptly, is a recipe for hostile results to your business.
The following data will convince you just how online user-generated content impacts your sales and brand reputation:
This concludes one thing: whatever people post and publish online about your product or service, it is true or not, has an immense and long-term influence on your brand value. Effective content moderation helps you do three things: highlight the concrete feedback you received from your clients, combat fake and harmful user-generated content, and address customer’s criticisms without losing their trust.
To help you with your content moderation for an even better online reputation management, there are rules that proficient content managers and online strategists suggest:
Welcome not-so-positive user-generated content
Today, business transparency is a virtue. Customers admire and respect brands that remain real and true by allowing their customers to express their authentic, constructive, and unenthusiastic comments. It shows the brand is secure enough to acknowledge that they are not perfect and still ironing out with issues. Over-moderating, taking down every single negative user-generated content that appears online, from all your social media channels, websites, even third-party sites dedicated to customer’s rhetorics about their negative CXs can do more harm to your business than good.
Respond quick and act on it
Because user-generated content is published online in mere seconds and viewed by millions in hours, it’s on you to address and act immediately to keep your professional online reputation.
Did a customer succeed in posting a profane image together with offensive language on your online forum? Take it down that second, and convey an apologetic message to all or who may have seen it.
Did a customer post the most berating review on your social media page? The worst thing you can do is to overlook it. Respond as quickly and as gently as you can. Respond like this as an example: “We appreciate you for sharing your remarks. Our team has started working on this concern. Thank you for your patience and understanding.” You will gain brownie points if you post an update that the issue has already been resolved.
Nowadays content moderation is no longer an optional process because your brand’s online reputation firmly prescribes your brand’s actual reputation for a long time.
User-generated content is growing as the leading source of product knowledge for your customers to consider before making their buying decisions. The overall quality of your user-generated content and your approach towards it will fully affect your brand’s sales and reputation. Understanding these three guidelines for effective content moderation will help you develop your brand’s online reputation, and promote more positive user-generated content to come your way.
Content moderation is sketched to provide that wall and make social media platforms into secure accommodation for content to be created and consumed. It’s still a standard process, however, and not advanced enough to catch everything.
Not only does this technology help in moderating existing content, but it also has the potential to block objectionable posts from appearing in the first place. For instance, when an unchecked agent creates an improper description for a product sold online or a buyer posts a review that includes offensive language and the foul language goes viral before anyone sees it coming.
By dealing proactively with these potential obstacles through advanced moderation tools, brands can save themselves from the kind of brand management errors that cost resources and rubble reputations.
Further on the horizon, computer vision and Machine Learning (ML) will scale the content moderation process even more. Right now, there are advanced technologies available to target precise words and questionable images, but the video moderation part still mostly relies on intense human intervention. Because images and video are so nuanced, there will possibly be a human component to moderation for generations to come. However, improvements underway will help machines view video footage, even streaming footage, in context to identify likely questionable content. That way, overgeneralized moderation won’t accidentally remove valid or meaningful content. On the flip side, malicious content won’t slip through the cracks because machines will thoroughly read the content they’re “seeing.” Whereas comprehensive censorship would patently separate content on several forms of “cancer research“. Due to the simple removal of vulgar and objectionable words, intelligent analysis technologies will recognize this information is secure and ready for public consumption.
Progress in content moderation technology is helping to create a secure room for user-driven content online. Though there is no master key to fix, the utilization of technology has an important role to play. Intelligent content moderation will help to build a more reliable, more positive CX and social environment for everyone. It will also help businesses protect their brand reputations while keeping an open, omnichannel dialogue with the customers they serve.