Content Moderation Types and Importance for Brand Building

In recent years, online spamming and scamming have increased, especially on social media. This negatively impacts the brand image and reputation of businesses. A comprehensive policy should be in place to handle comments, remarks, and feedback with negative connotations and business insights.

Content moderation is the technique that helps such companies to monitor spammers or keep an eye on user-generated content (UGC) and control their impacts. Social media managers play an essential role in controlling the nasty remarks of the audience on social networks, or they personally interact with users or customers to improve their behavior towards a particular brand.

What is Content Moderation?

Content moderation is the practice of monitoring and applying pre-determined guidelines and codes of behavior for user-generated content submission to determine best if a particular comment, post, or feedback is publicly permissible.

Despite the fact that content moderation has been stereotyped negatively in recent years, Cogito is reversing these perceptions by transforming the role into one that is more interactive. Content moderation companies play a vital role in protecting reputed users from experiencing offensive content.

Cogito will make you understand what types of content moderation services are used to execute the strategy and maintain the order to protect your online community.

Types of Content Moderation

1. Pre-Moderation

As the name signifies, pre-moderation means a moderator checks each piece of content before it is displayed on the site. This technique helps to protect the dynamics of the community as it can be deployed where the content is not controversial or time-sensitive. This is most suited for highly sensitive sites like dating websites, celebrity-based communities, or online portals targeting the young audience or children.

The best benefit of Pre-moderation is that it provides high control of what content can be displayed on your site, empowering the moderator to ensure that any kind of unsuitable content will never make it online, which means offensive words can never appear. Your brand image will not be affected by such commentaries. This process is also helpful for sentiment analysis online for moderators to understand the feelings of the online audience and respond to them or react to such sensitive comments accordingly.

2. Post-Moderation

Post-moderation is a complete inverse of pre-moderation, allowing comments to appear immediately after posting where the discussion starts on a real-time basis. Post-moderation conversations take place on a real-time basis in which the moderator identifies the contents, acts according to the users’ intentions, and responds to them accordingly.

The best part of this technique is the conversation takes place on a real-time basis, and unsuitable content is passed onto the moderator team to deal with and removed immediately if it is not suitable for the community. Post-moderation can be done by a team of human moderators using the automated system that flags inappropriate content.

3. Reactive Moderation

Reactive Moderation is a sole moderation method that relies on users to report the content when they feel it is inappropriate for the community. This means community members use the reporting button to inform the administrator or moderator to review the content and remove the same if found unsuitable or against the community rules. Social Media content moderation is widely used on such platforms to moderate such content.

The best part of reactive moderation is it questionably puts power into the hands of the user, and it can be used along with pre and post-moderation in case anything gets through the moderators. It is purely a user-generated content moderation where community members are freely allowed to report inappropriate content, theoretically avoiding responsibility for defamatory or illegal content uploaded by web users.

4. Automated Moderation

All the aforesaid content moderation methods mainly rely on humans. Still, an automated moderation technique uses various technical tools to process UGC with pre-defined rules to accept or reject the content posted on the community wall. This method is operated with the help of software that automatically filters bad content containing offensive words or languages and removes them without human intervention.

Many typical tools and software are used to filter words and IP ban lists, image recognition for illegal content, and sentiment analysis, but this could only be effective if a word is posted with altered spelling or has a double meaning.

Any method or technique the moderators adopt depends on the needs, feasibility, and type of interaction they want to have with their audiences, users, or members of the community. Many companies do not consider moderation an essential part of their social media governance policy, but most realize that without some form of moderation, they can suffer a significant loss in brand image, leading to revenue losses over the long term.

Companies that are concerned about their brand image in the market can turn to Cogito for content moderation services that include spam detection and review moderation.

Importance of Content Moderation for Brand Building

Content moderation should be scalable and allow you to place a statement in its context to determine the toxicity level of the users’ content. As part of the process, we at Cogito review the user’s profile, comments, images, videos, and any links in the post in addition to researching any unusual terms that appear in the post. Having this information will assist you in classifying the content as toxic if it turns out to be so.

Here are some reasons why it is important to choose a content moderation vendor following this process:

1. Ensure the safety of your brand and users

Photos, videos, and comments on blog posts and forums posted to your site need monitoring. You must watch out for inappropriate user-generated content because it could deviate other users from what they want to look for.

The opinions people share about your brand are beyond your control, but you can always moderate what they post online. It’ll keep your website safe from offensive or upsetting content and protect your audience from potential bullying or trolling.

2. Gain a deeper understanding of your customer base and users

This is especially true in high-volume campaigns in which your moderators are able to tag content with particular properties such as thoughts and attitudes toward your brand and so on. Using this data, content moderators can design actionable insights into how users behave and think and find out if anything needs to be improved on your brand.

3. Enhance visibility on the web

Some of the biggest brands produced 25 percent of their search results based on user-generated content, according to a Google study. Your brand’s reputation depends on user content, but you also need to make sure it doesn’t damage it.

Make sure to have a dedicated team of moderators on the ground to sift through the content before it is published. It is fine for users to post as much content as they want, but a dedicated team of moderation staff should be in place. Including nothing offensive or against your brand may attract quality traffic to your website.

4. Make buying easier and more effective

Print, radio, and television ads may no longer be as effective at persuading customers or influencing their behavior. As more and more people use ad blockers on their browsers, traditional methods like pop-up ads, auto-play videos, and banner ads don’t do well. Having ad blockers makes it harder for businesses to reach their customers.

You will reach a greater number of potential buyers with user-generated content on your site than with digital advertisements. Their interest is piqued by what others think of your brand. As buyers make decisions about purchases today, they often consult other buyers for opinions or referrals. The buying process and buyer behavior could be improved by moderated user-generated content.

5. Helps get closer to your customers

Featuring content from real customers or users will likely enhance customer relationships and the credibility of your brand and business offerings. Content on your site needs to be well-moderated to make your brand look authentic, relatable, approachable, and friendly. People are more likely to connect with you if your brand is worth talking about.

Conclusion

In order to weed out offensive posts, abusive comments, threats of violence, and even sexual harassment, you need a moderation team. It’s always wise to check user-generated content for relevance and appropriateness.

Bring us on board to enhance your brand’s visibility while maintaining a safe community. Boost audience engagement and generate interest in your brand by allowing user-generated content to flow in. Invest in our content moderation services to help you build your brand with appropriately moderated user-generated content on the web, wherever it is, e.g., on websites, forums, social media channels, blogs, etc.