The digital marketing industry is one propelled by user-generated content or UGC.
UGCs are content created by consumers of a brand or similar people not directly affiliated with a particular business.
These types of content may be testimonials, product reviews, and other similar published content.
In a market where customers trust and value other consumers’ words more highly than brand marketers, UGCs are a valuable marketing tool.
However, given that UGCs are not created by people under a brand’s employment, the content they publish may not align with the message that a business wants to amplify.
These UGCs may have content that contradicts the brand’s values, politically incorrect and inflammatory messages, or other potentially socially blunderous content.
Businesses often employ content moderation as a proactive measure to prevent potentially damaging marketing gaffes with UGCs.
What is content moderation?
Content moderation is the process of filtering the elements contained within a published post on a website or social media platform.
This process may involve censoring – or outright removing – content deemed inappropriate to publish on a given platform.
Due to the popularity and ease of access to various online platforms, content moderation has become a staple practice in online marketplaces, social media sites, online forums, dating sites, etc.
Whether these contents are images, GIFs, texts, or other types of files, content moderators take them down if they fail to comply with the platform’s guidelines.
However, every online platform will inevitably have varying guidelines.
Thus, it’s the responsibility of content creators and other users to know these guidelines and follow them accordingly.
How does content moderation work?
Content moderation works by giving some individuals authorization to remove content deemed inappropriate or violating the guidelines of a platform.
These individuals are called content moderators.
Some platforms also utilize software tools for automated content moderation based on parameters.
These parameters serve as the basis for content moderation, depending on the platform’s nature, user expectations, and demographics.
Human moderators also follow these parameters or moderation thresholds.
Moderating the content published on a platform can be done before or after a post has become live. These moderation methods are respectively known as pre- and post-moderation.
Pre-moderation has become too slow and unable to keep up with the large volume of UGCs today.
Hence, most platforms now prefer the post-moderation of contents.
What types of content are usually moderated?
Almost any content published on an online platform can be subject to moderation.
Depending on the content medium that users can publish on an online platform, these are some of the most common:
Text posts
Text posts include just about every type of content consisting primarily of texts.
These may be in the form of
- Social media discussions
- Discussion forums
- Job postings
- Comments
Combing large amounts of texts is taxing for human moderators, so they often employ automation tools to aid them.
Images
Compared to texts, moderating images is more straightforward.
However, setting clear guidelines and retaining human supervision over the moderation process are still needed.
This is because some images that may not contain explicit content can still be inappropriate under a particular context.
Videos
Moderating video content can be more challenging than text moderation.
Text moderation can be improved by moderators’ reading speed and by using automation tools. Whereas with videos, moderators must watch video content entirely to single out an inappropriate scene that can flash in less than a second.
Adding to the difficulty that video moderation presents is the fact that many videos also contain textual and audio content.
These elements also have to undergo review and play a part in whether the content under moderation would pass or have to be removed.
Advantages of outsourcing content moderation services
Tapping into an outsourcing firm’s resources to help with content moderation gives businesses plenty of benefits.
These are some of them:
Access to expert moderators
Outsourcing firms often have teams of professionals in various fields ready to augment the workforce of other companies.
These experts include professional moderators with years of experience in content moderation across multiple platforms and industries.
More cost-efficient
Outsourcing content moderation processes to an offshore service provider is more cost-efficient for businesses.
Besides having access to cheaper labor (as much as 70% lower!), businesses won’t also have to incur additional costs like purchasing moderation software and other equipment.
Access to better tech
As outsourcing firms have various teams of professionals from different industries, it’s only natural that they also have the premium tools they use in their fields.
For content moderation experts, these tools include software with at least the following capabilities:
- Nudity detection
- All caps text detection
- Profanity symbols/text detection
- Adjustable filters/parameters
- Automated UGC moderation
- External software integration
- Language recognition
24/7 moderation
Almost all outsourcing firms operate on a non-stop, 24-hour schedule.
These firms have staff on a rotating schedule to cover the entire day’s shift and ensure uninterrupted services for their clients.
Businesses won’t have to worry about potentially offensive and inappropriate content getting published on their platform during their in-house staff’s off-hours.
