From product reviews to social media posts, user-generated content (UGC) is a powerful medium to capture and share your brand and customer community’s authenticity. UGC can boost trust in your products, promote engagement with other customers, and improve customer engagement. And its effects are far-reaching: according to research by Cloudinary, 70% of Gen Z and 78% of Millennial shoppers rely on videos and photos when making purchases, and 92% of consumers trust UGC more than traditional advertising.
However, in the current sea of seemingly endless UGC, moderation is no longer an option, but a requirement. Let’s dive deeper into why UGC moderation is crucial and how platforms like MediaFlows by Cloudinary can help you get the most out of UGC.
Moderation is the process of monitoring, reviewing, and filtering UGC to ensure it aligns with quality standards, legal regulations, and brand values:
- Quality control. Maintaining a high standard of content ensures that your brand maintains its reputation and credibility. Plus, you want everything on your website, social, and other digital platforms to look picture-perfect and professional all the time.
- Compliance and regulations. Adhering to legal requirements and community guidelines protects your brand from potential lawsuits and reputational damage, preventing financial penalties and massive headaches in the future.
- Brand look and feel. While created by sources outside of the brand, UGC should still reflect your brand’s identity and messaging. Consistency in visuals and tone also enhances brand recall and encourages customer loyalty.
MediaFlows by Cloudinary is a low-code media workflow automation platform that can streamline and automate UGC moderation and optimization. Let’s explore how it can be leveraged in an example scenario, where you run an e-commerce store specializing in all things coffee.
As most e-commerce brands do, you encourage customers to leave reviews with photos of their purchases. However, giving everyone on the internet full freedom to post photos on your review platform isn’t always the best idea. You’ll need to vet each photo before they’re published to ensure that they meet your quality and community standards.
With MediaFlows, you can automate this moderation process, filtering out irrelevant or inappropriate content while ensuring compliance with your company and industry’s content policies.
Down the line, you also decide to showcase real users enjoying your products on your website. In this case, on top of the basic moderation, you’ll also need to confirm that each of the images that goes live actually visibly represents the coffee products that you sell and not a competitor’s coffee, or no coffee at all.
Using AI-powered auto-tagging, MediaFlows can help validate each image slotted to go live by verifying the presence of your product in the content. These automated checks ensure website quality and relevancy without the need for constant manual work.
Finally, you’ve decided to begin sharing UGC on social media platforms to garner additional interest from potential customers and engage your existing customer community. On top of moderation and validation, you now need to make sure that the images fit the requirements for each social media platform (in terms of dimensions and ratios) and that they are branded properly.
MediaFlows enables you to standardize content automatically for each social media channel, whether that’s cropping your images to specific dimensions or editing images to maintain a cohesive brand presence. You can even utilize Cloudinary’s generative AI capabilities to remove, add, or recolor content through your workflows.
UGC is a powerful asset for brands in the digital age; however, effective moderation is key to harnessing its benefits while mitigating risks. With tools like MediaFlows, brands can automate the UGC moderation process, saving time and resources while ensuring brand consistency and compliance. MediaFlows’ easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface and scalable workflows empower brands to unleash the full power of UGC without compromising on quality or brand integrity.
