If you see branded content that doesn’t come from a brand itself, it’s probably user-generated content or UGC. UGC is any type of content — from comments to pictures with purchased items and videos with reviews — this content is typically shared on social networks, websites, or forums. It is not produced by the brand itself but by its users or customers.
In this article, I'm not going to focus on how to encourage users to create such content. It is about user-generated content management. I’ll tell you how to upload, moderate, host, and deliver such content so that it doesn’t harm your customer experience or web performance.
Why is UGC important?
Fact: over 99.9% of online shoppers report checking reviews during their shopping experience once in a while. In 2018 this was “just” 97%. UGC works as social proof and helps businesses build trustful relationships with their audience
Whatever form UGC takes, it usually works much better than traditional advertising. Here’s why: It’s authentic. 90% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support, and, according to them, user-generated content is way more authentic than brand-created content.
As of March 2023, 43 percent of surveyed U.S. adults said they regularly read online reviews of local businesses, and 34 percent said they always did. If the user sees that your product has solved similar problems for another party, they’ll trust you much more than after viewing your landing page.
Hey, I’m experiencing the same problem!
It helps you make sales. The same research shows that 79% of people say UGC highly influences their purchasing decisions.
On top of that, such content doesn’t require lots of time or money investments from the brand. Usually, it’s created organically; you just need to gently push your audience in the right direction by creating a user-friendly flow on your website.
Whether your site consists of content that users create, or you just plan to add a comment section to your blog, keep reading to discover the best practices of managing UGC right.
Wait, is UGC management a big deal?
When you post content to your website, you have complete control over it. You can post it just the way you need it — in a suitable resolution, compliant with your brand book, optimized for search engines, and so on.
When you open up your website to user-generated content, you lose this control. And if you don’t adjust everything right, your website can turn into a mess, becoming a go-to place for scammy link builders.
UGC Challenges
Here are the most common challenges you can encounter after allowing user-generated content:
- Some users can post irrelevant or offensive content.
- Bots can spam your website.
- Users can upload files that are too large or in the wrong formats, which can harm your website’s load speed.
- Users can post images of different sizes and styles, leading to a lack of consistency throughout the website.
- The content published by users won’t be properly optimized for search engines, harming overall website performance.
- Users can publish NSFW content
Now let’s take a closer look at each of these challenges and describe some of the most common user-generated content management mechanics:
- Have a content policy
- Provide an easy way to upload and edit visuals
- Make sure the uploaded content is optimized
- Take care of content moderation
- Filter malicious content
- Don’t forget about SEO
- Organize your storage
- Provide privacy
- Ensure a proper security level
Have a content policy
So, you’ve decided to open up your website to user-generated content — for example, product testimonials or comments on blog posts. The first thing you need to do is create a UGC content policy.
This page can include:
- Types of content that aren’t allowed like: spam, malware, irrelevant links, offensive content, and private information.
- Your guidelines for photos and videos. Examples: The image resolution should be 640 x 480 pixels minimum; do not publish pictures or videos in which people are identifiable without their permission.
- Rules for communicating with other users. Eg. no hateful or offensive comments; do not reveal someone’s personal information.
A UGC policy will help users understand what you expect from the content they post. Plus, it will act as your guide for all questionable matters during content moderation. To create this page, you might need to consult with lawyers. Here, I found an article with examples of what you should consider when drafting T&C for a website or an app that has user-generated content.
Provide an easy way to upload and edit visuals
If you want to allow your users to post images and videos to your site, you need to provide them with an easy way to upload and edit them.
For example, if your users need to upload a profile photo, it would be nice if the uploader on your website allowed users to crop images to a square in a few clicks. Remember: It’s in your best interest to have your users create content for you, so make sure that the uploading and editing process is easy and smooth.
The fastest and easiest way to solve this issue is to integrate a ready-made file uploader. Uploadcare File Uploader is a good choice because it provides a built-in image editor with lots of possible image transformations. Besides cropping, users can resize, rotate, adjust quality, blur some areas, or even add a watermark to a photo.
Smart, object-oriented cropping
An easy-to-use file uploader will help you get more user-generated content: when users can smoothly upload and edit their visuals, they’ll more likely hit the “publish” button.
Another useful Uploadcare feature I want to recommend is the smart crop. Let’s say you let your users write product testimonials and back them up with product photos.
It will happen that some photos taken by users will include an irrelevant background that distracts from what’s important. With smart crop, you can teach your system to analyze images, detect the most important object in each photo, and crop the rest automatically.
Make sure the uploaded content is optimized
Another problem is that users don’t usually bother about the size and format of the files they upload. That’s why sometimes they can, for example, add too large images or use outdated image formats. And if your site contains a lot of unoptimized images, its load speed and overall performance will suffer killing your sales on the way.
Even if you’ve specified the maximum file size and required formats, some users probably won’t pay attention to it, and some don’t even know how to crop images.
The good news is, that your users don’t have to know how to do it and you can still enjoy a perfectly optimized website. With Uploadcare, you can shrink all images uploaded by the users automatically. Just tick the checkbox in the settings.
It also lets you automatically convert all the uploaded photos to WebP/AVIF format — the best format for publishing photos on the web, and automatically convert GIF files to video format, which is also better for SEO. It will optimize all the pictures and videos independently to each end user's screen. How cool is that?
Take care of content moderation
Sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with spammy content posted by bots. Thus, any website owner who accepts UGC needs to take care of content moderation.
For this, you can either hire content moderators or you can monitor it yourself. It depends on the amount of UGC you receive and the time you can commit to your blog/forum etc.
It is important to review your user-generated content regularly. If we’re talking about a large marketplace that receives a lot of UGC every day, it’s best to automate the process. How?
- Use a CAPTCHA on content submission to fight back against bots. One of the most popular systems you can try is Google’s reCAPTCHA.
- Allow your users to help you with moderation by adding a "Report a violation" link to user-generated content.
- Validate the types of files you want to accept.
- Apply various checks after (e.g., virus checking).
- Alternatively, you can also use Uploadcare’s object and face recognition tool to automate your moderation process. This tool helps you define a general class of objects in a photo: it can detect a car, a person, a vegetable, or any other object you need.
The latter three are possible to do with Uploadcare. You can set up a project to only upload certain types of files, detect infected or malicious files, detect everything that’s not a desired object for your website, and prevent people from adding such photos to your site.
Ensure a proper security level
When you open up your website to UGC, there’s always a risk of malware, unauthorized server access, attacks on users’ data, hosting of illegal files, and so on. Here are the best practices for file upload security that will help prevent vulnerabilities:
- Restrict uploading of certain file types. For example, set up your uploader so that it doesn’t accept executable files (.exe, .bat, .app, etc.). These file types are capable of executing commands and running malicious code.
- Set a maximum file size and limit the number of uploads. This will help you prevent a potential service outage if someone decides to bring your site down by flooding it with large files.
- Store files outside the webroot. This will prevent you from having security problems as well as data losses during migrations.
- Set up SSL encryption. This will secure data passed between the web server and browser.
- Ensure compliance. The upload form should be compliant with the GDPR, EU-US Privacy Shield, and other regulatory standards recommended for your niche and country.
Uploadcare provides all these features out of the box, as well as some advanced security features like HIPAA compliance, data encryption, access control, and backups.
Don’t forget about SEO
If you allow users to post content on your site, you need to make sure that your website automatically puts the right HTML tags and uses the correct markup.
Why is this important? See, the main goal of search engine robots is to make sure that the information on a website corresponds to a user’s search query. To find out if your content is relevant and adds value to the user, search bots need to understand what your page is about. Keywords and tags are what help bots understand your content better and show it to users who need it.
A high-performing website is also valuable to streamline your backlink efforts with partner brands since the more valuable your content is, the more eager they would be to provide backlinks.
That’s why you need to use the right HTML tags throughout the entire website: metadata, headings, subheadings, etc. Find the full list of recommendations for HTML here: HTML Living Standard.
Another thing you can do to help search engine bots better understand the context of your page is to provide structured data. Structured data is a standardized format for classifying the page content. For example, if there are reviews on your page, you can use a review schema to structure the content.
Here’s what it’ll look like:
<div itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Review">
<span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,
<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011
<div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Rating">
<meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
<span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
<span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
</div>
<span itemprop="reviewBody">Great microwave for the price. It is small and
fits in my apartment.</span>
</div>
By adding this markup, you not only give search bots more context but also allow them to showcase this information via Rich Snippets. If you provide structured data, ratings and other info can appear in the SERPs. All the schemas for structured data are gathered on Schema.org.
Organize your storage
One more factor you need to take care of is where you’re going to host all the content that users upload to your site. Saving user’s files on the same server where all your important website files are stored isn’t a good idea. If some malicious software slips through, it can bring your entire website down.
The most optimal way to host UGC is to use separate cloud storage, and Uploadcare can provide you with it. Plus, the Object Recognition feature can not only detect what’s in the picture but it will also assign labels to each photo, helping you organize your assets, sort them out into folders, and quickly let you find the content afterward.
Have a privacy policy and align with it
Say a user wants to share a photo of a meal in your restaurant. But here’s the thing: in the background of the photo, some people accidentally happened to be in the frame. Does this mean the user can’t publish the photo, and you lose a great piece of UGC?
That’s right: you can’t publish a photo if there are people in it who didn’t give their permission. What you can do is simply blur their faces. You can allow users to blur areas in the photo manually, or you can adjust your system to do it automatically in certain cases. With Uploadcare, it won’t take you longer than a few minutes.
Wrapping up
Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, it is a lot of work if you do it manually or build a solution from scratch: from an uploading solution to a moderation system. But if you decide to integrate a media handling tool, you’ll be able to get most of those preparations done by the end of the day.
Uploadcare has everything you need to upload, moderate, deliver, and store UGC. If you want to make sure it’s the solution you’re looking for, you can give it a spin using the free plan, or you can schedule a demo and our expert will show you around.
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