UGC is a powerful tool that can improve your brand’s reputation, strengthen your online community and drive more engagement. But there are a few risks that you should be aware of when allowing your community members to upload content.
To mitigate these risks, your business needs a comprehensive user generated content moderation strategy. The best approach depends on your brand’s goals and budget.
Humans
User-generated content (UGC) is a type of online content that users create or post about a product or company. These ideas may be in the form of text, pictures or video.
Many UGC platforms, such as social media and marketplaces, use a combination of automated tools and live human moderators to review content. This moderation approach has a number of benefits, including the ability to catch spam and malware before it gets into the system.
However, there are some downsides to using AI as your sole content moderation tool. For one, it can be difficult to train AI to catch everything, and it can also be expensive. Having full-time human moderators on staff can be much more cost effective, but it takes time and resources to train them and make sure they have the necessary training to do their job effectively.
Another major disadvantage of AI-based moderation is that it often misses some of the more offensive content. This is especially true with images and videos, since AI doesn’t have the 20/20 vision of humans on what should be removed.
For these reasons, it’s essential to employ a hybrid moderation system that utilizes AI tools alongside human reviews. A combination of these two methods can help brands avoid censorship, uphold a certain quality of content, and even protect against Black Hat SEO tactics.
Regardless of the method you choose, it’s essential to have clear guidelines around the types of UGC your brand allows. This will help users know what you expect from them and help you maintain a positive brand image.
A UGC policy is an excellent way to keep your brand safe from a variety of threats, from trolls to fake content. It can also provide a sense of safety to your users, encouraging them to share the content they feel is right for your brand.
In addition to preventing harmful and illegal content from entering the UGC pool, a robust moderation strategy can also boost engagement and conversions. Creating an environment where your customers can express themselves is a huge driver of loyalty and retention, especially in communities that are small and tight-knit.
AI
User generated content is a significant part of online communities, but it can also cause serious issues for brands and users. In order to prevent harmful, illegal, or offensive content from being shared, brands often need to hire a team of trained moderators who can quickly and accurately moderate UGC posts.
While it’s not a substitute for human moderation, AI can support human moderators by filtering out questionable content for them to review. This helps save time and resources for content moderation teams, allowing them to more effectively manage their sites.
Aside from the productivity benefits, AI-powered tools can help companies protect their brand and ensure that all users have a safe experience on their site. These tools can detect and flag images containing illegal or harmful content, enabling brands to take action against violating posts.
As technology and data evolves, so too will the need for more scalable content moderation solutions. In order to achieve this, companies should consider a combination of automated moderation technologies and human-powered moderation.
The first step is to set the AI’s threshold for predicting what types of content will be safe or inappropriate. This will help you determine how confident you want the system to be before displaying predictions on your website or social media pages.
Using a lower threshold can be helpful in cases where the content is likely to contain harmful or objectionable content, but it’s important to keep an eye out for false predictions as well. In these cases, AI will need to be trained more thoroughly on a large sample of different types of content to ensure that it’s accurate.
There are a number of different AI-powered modesration tools available to help brands automate and moderate their online communities. These tools can automatically analyze different formats of content, including text, pictures, and videos to identify inappropriate posts. They can then filter and classify these posts, preventing them from being shared. Moreover, they can create keyword blacklists to help brands prevent UGC from being posted on their site. By combining these tools with a dedicated human moderation team, companies can achieve the best outcomes in the online world while protecting their customers and brand.
Automation
User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most effective ways to build brand loyalty and drive sales. But it also comes with risk. Users who share offensive or inappropriate content could negatively affect your brand and community members.
Fortunately, there are solutions that can help you with user generated content moderation. Automated tools can analyze and filter online content, ensuring that it doesn’t go out into the world without your permission.
AI-backed content moderation can automatically analyze texts, visuals and videos for toxic content, helping brands keep their platforms clean and safe. It can also prevent harmful content from being shared and reduce the need for human moderators.
In addition, AI-backed UGC moderation can detect infringements and block the offending content before it even reaches human moderators. This helps to ensure that users have a positive experience on your platform and minimizes the mental health impact that toxic content can have.
As a result, automating your content moderation strategy can save you time and money while helping your team maintain authentic content that will engage and strengthen your brand’s presence. For example, Cirque du Soleil, Think Iowa City and other brands have leveraged automated UGC management to boost social reach, improve website performance, increase staff time efficiency and create a robust repository of images.
However, AI-backed content moderation can be prone to errors and false positives, especially when it is trained on millions of examples. The best approach is to combine human review with AI efforts to ensure accurate monitoring of online content.
Technology
User generated content can be a powerful marketing tool, but it can also be a source of risk if it is not properly moderated. Properly filtered UGC can help your brand build credibility, improve customer satisfaction, and increase online engagement. In addition, it can provide a unique, fresh perspective for your brand.
Moderation of UGC can be done manually, or it can be automated. With automated moderation, algorithms can identify harmful content before it is shared on your platform. This increases the speed of your moderation process and ensures that all content is handled in a timely manner.
Using AI in moderation can be a good option because it helps to keep your business from being overwhelmed with the amount of content that is being uploaded on your website. It can also save you a lot of time and money on employee payroll costs.
With AI, you can use tools that analyze text and speech, as well as images, to flag content that violates your company’s policies or could be a security threat. These tools aren’t foolproof, but they can help you get ahead of potential problems before they occur.
Another useful tool for moderation is computer vision. This can help you determine if a photo is clear or blurry, ensuring that your website looks good and that your customers will be satisfied with their experience.
In some cases, you can hire freelancers to perform the moderation function for you. They are usually cheaper than in-house workers, and they don’t have to be physically located in your country. However, this can be a disadvantage because you may not be able to fully monitor their work and you might not be able to find the best employees.
Another option for moderation is reactive moderation, which depends on community members to report inappropriate or offensive content. This can be a quick way to get bad content off your site, but it comes with the risk of making a potentially harmful image or message visible to your audience for a short period of time.