In today’s world, 92% of consumers worldwide often trust recommendations from other people more than they trust brands’ ads. One of the best ways to influence customers’ trust is User-generated content (UGC). User-generated content contains any form of content that’s related to your business and created by your customers. People post and share content all the time across different social channels. These days they have more power and influence than ever before. It can be both good and bad for your company. Your online store visitors can fall in love with your product or brand so much that they create unpaid or unsponsored social posts about it.

People these days are free to express their opinion through any media but when is too much freedom too much? Sometimes people use freedom of speech to post objectionable or harmful content, which includes hate speech, threats, negative online comments, fake reviews, explicit images, and videos. Spamming and scamming have also negative effects on your online business. They can harm your brand’s name and reputation, which is where content moderation comes in. Content moderation can help you control these risks before they do any damage. Without it, people can publish anything they want without consequences thus damaging your professional online reputation.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions:

What is content moderation?

Why is it important for user-generated campaigns?

What is Content Moderation?

You may have heard of content moderation before, but what does it mean? Content Moderation is an effective technique that helps you prevent spam, negative reviews, trolling, and bullying and keeps an eye on user-generated content. It is the method of carefully examining user-generated content based on the company’s pre-defined rules and social media policy. According to the rules, it is decided whether to approve certain submissions or not.

As an online store owner, you need to use content moderation to ensure that your customers see high-quality content and positive feedback from your customers. Content moderation helps you to understand your customers better, and address negative customer reviews without losing their trust. It is crucial for building customer experience and trust between your company and your potential customers. It helps you build a safer environment for your customers where inappropriate content like fake news, spam, racism, abusive texts, or NSFW won’t harm them. Maintaining brand reputation and credibility for businesses and followers is the goal of content moderation.

Why is Content Moderation Important for User-Generated Campaigns?

Content created by real people inspires trust and it will differ from that created by your marketing team. Visual social proof like examples of people enjoying your products and services is more important than ever. UGC is a powerful tool for increasing customer trust. The content you get from the users is real and trustworthy and has no price tags. UGC gives you a competitive edge and it influences the buying decision of 90% of customers.

Despite its obvious benefits, you can’t just let people post offensive content on your website. You should moderate user-generated content.

Content moderation has many advantages but here are some main points to help you understand why it is important for user-generated campaigns.  

Protects your Brand Reputation and Users

The Internet is the place where all types of content are present, including written texts, images, videos, blog posts, Instagram and Facebook posts, Quora publications, and tweets. The problem arises when people post whatever they want on your website or social media pages and sometimes these UGC posts are harmful and can damage your brand. You cannot control how people perceive your brand. Luckily for you, content moderation helps here. The main duty of moderators is to uphold any rules that have been put in place to make sure that people do not cross the line with the content they upload and share.

For example:

• Facebook and Instagram strongly prohibit hate speech, threats, graphic violence, and nudity
• Twitter doesn’t allow you to share hateful slurs, death threats, use racist, abusive, and sexist language

Content moderation provides a healthy and safe environment for both brands and users to interact. It also protects users from harmful content online, trolls and bullies, spammers and scammers, inappropriate and disturbing images, and videos, and helps companies to protect their brand and reputation.

Improves Web Traffic

Your user-generated content is used for a variety of things. It can help you rank higher on Google and boost your website traffic. The rating of a website may be impacted by any unfavorable comments or reviews made about products or services. They can affect your reputation and SEO. With content moderation, you can remove these negative comments or reviews. Plus, it will help you build a positive customer experience. The more positive experience they have on your company’s website or social media page, the better. Your customers will feel more connected with your brand. It will increase your brand reputation and social engagement. As a result, you will get more traffic to your website. 82% of marketers see an increase in visitor engagement when they use UGC on their website. Higher traffic will turn potential leads into paying customers.  

Helps You Understand Your Customer Base

User-generated content plays an important role in understanding your clientele. By moderating user-generated content you will learn about your customer’s needs; refine the sales strategy to address those needs. Through content moderation, you can uncover valuable insights into how your customers think, and talk about your products or services. You can find out what they are complaining about, and make meaningful product changes to make your clients happy and satisfied. Moreover, you can enhance your brand.

Helps You Scale Marketing Campaigns

The value of content moderation extends beyond social media platforms and is vital for the success of your user-generated campaigns. You need to have high-quality content moderation to keep spam out during these online campaigns. Keep your customers informed about new features or updates prior to the launch. If your digital marketing campaigns have been successful on social media platforms then there’s a need for content moderation. All you have to do is moderate the content on these platforms based on what they see as spam.

Protects from Spam and Explicit Content

Content Moderation can protect your site from user-generated spam. Spam content can drive your users away because most of the time it is irrelevant, unwanted, annoying, and inappropriate. It is something your customers wouldn’t want to see in their news feed. By allowing spam content on your social media pages you could lose your followers and it’s bad for your brand reputation.

Plus, some of the content your users post is not for public viewing like erotic images and videos. They do it because they want likes and people’s attention and you don’t want that type of content on your online store’s webpage or social media pages. It will scare away your online store visitors. With content moderation, you will protect them from explicit content. The NSFW images or videos will be removed from your site.

Conclusion

There’s no denying the fact that content moderation is crucial for user-generated campaigns in 2022 as more and more, online content is being produced. There are so many people exposed to it. Your online store visitors are sometimes exposed to abusive, explicit, and spammy content. Fortunately, content moderation can help you with that problem. It can also improve your online presence and reputation, drive more traffic to your online store and give you valuable insights into the buying behavior and opinions of your customers. Content Moderation is a necessity nowadays.