Content marketing and content moderation go hand-in-hand. They’re excellent ways to promote your business in this digital age. With content marketing, you can create quality content that people can consume to understand your brand and products better.
Content moderation ensures that your content is reviewed well for your audience. To build relationships with your customers, you need to release moderated content that resonates.
Read on to learn about the types of content moderation your organization can benefit from.
What is content moderation?
Content moderation reviews and removes unwanted, inappropriate, or illegal content from a website. It also refers to the use of automated tools for this purpose.
Content moderation is an integral part of many companies’ operations online. Even if they didn’t create the content themselves, they’re legally responsible for its presence on their channels.
Content moderators are responsible for ensuring that online spaces are safe, inclusive, and respectful. They play a crucial role in protecting the well-being of your channels’ visitors and establishing your brand as accessible to all.
Examples of moderated content
Content moderators review the following:
- Spam or inappropriate content
- Adherence to policies and guidelines
- Copyright law violations
- Published private or sensitive information
- Profanity or offensive language
- Content that promotes illegal activity
- Images of graphic violence or nudity
- Submitted and guest posts
- Product reviews
- Chat rooms and forums
Types of content moderation
There are five types of content moderation that you need to be aware of. All have their benefits and hindrances, and what method you use will depend mainly on the size of your business and how your content marketing operates.
The types of content moderation are:
Pre-moderation
Pre-moderation is filtering content before it is published on a site. Content moderators screen for objectionable content, such as pornography or hate speech, before allowing users to post.
This method is typically used by channels with high traffic volume, using techniques like image recognition, keyword filtering, and machine learning.
Pre-moderation is the most common form of content moderation and the most effective and secure way to prevent users from posting offensive material. However, it can be expensive and time-consuming.
Post-moderation
Post-moderation entails reviewing material for offensiveness after it has been posted online, even after it has been made public to users.
Because there is no need for staff to review every piece of material before it goes live, this kind of content moderation can be less expensive than pre-moderation. The main problem you’ll run into is that unless your moderators are super quick, you’ll risk users seeing unwanted content first.
Post-moderation is typically used by websites with low traffic volume or community members who want quick approval for their posts.
Like pre-moderation, post-moderation uses various techniques like manual human reviews and machine learning.
Reactive moderation
Reactive moderation involves a team of moderators who review content after it has been posted, similar to post-moderation. Where it differs is the former relies on users to flag content as offensive.
This type of content moderation puts more control in the hands of a brand’s users. While this massively reduces costs, the accuracy of content moderation will then depend on how precise your audience is.
This is used when a high volume of inappropriate content is posted, but it’s impossible to review every piece before it goes live.
Distributed moderation
Distributed moderation works similarly to reactive moderation because both rely on user efforts. Distributed gives even more of an emphasis on community efforts and crowdsourcing.
Your channel’s online community can vote or score published content. Content with high scores continues to be published. This guarantees plenty of interaction and productivity but doesn’t account for much security.
Distributed content moderation is usually done by small organizations with more manageable user bases. This ensures that the brand can more tightly control what content passes through.
Automated moderation
Automated moderation has computer programs detect and remove unsuitable content. This method has the most noticeable presence of artificial intelligence and is particularly useful for detecting spam and pornographic material.
The automated content moderation process uses an algorithm to identify and filter objectionable content. The main advantage for your company is this method can be done at scale, moderating a large amount of content quickly and efficiently.
The main flaw of primarily using AI for content moderation is the lack of human nuance that the task involves. A post, for example, may contain profanity yet still convey a valid point. AI will flag that content as offensive regardless, and you lose a valuable contribution.
Outsourcing content moderation
Content moderation is a growing field, with many organizations looking to outsource their needs. There are several reasons why outsourcing is a valid choice.
Some of these include:
- Efficiency – the outsourcing provider takes care of content moderation services for you. Your organization is then free to give more attention and productivity to core areas of the business.
- Reduction of operational costs – outsourcing content moderation allows you to focus on other core activities within your business. This helps reduce the costs of hiring and training in-house employees for this task.
- Accessibility – with outsourcing, you get 24/7 access to industry experts who can assist with any concerns during the content moderation process.
