"Moderating your real-time chat apps is a great way to keep your users entangled with like-minded people in their space, and boost retention rates."
Believe it or not, chat apps have indeed revolutionized the communication sector for the better good. And users have started to feel the sense of a community through quick and real-time chats between families and friends or with businesses. Thus, making them an inch closer to their chat apps. But, what comes along as a companion is the threat of breaking trust.
True! Trust can be easily broken or destroyed by any spammy content or bad actions within your chat app. In such cases, your app's engagement gets reduced and slowly demotes user retention in your chat app. However, chat moderation mitigates this drawback or a negative impact on your chat platform.
So in the article below let us find out what chat moderation is and what it takes to build a well-moderated chat platform to boost user retention.
What is Chat Moderation?
Chat moderations are an act of monitoring and regulating all user-generated content within the app. User-generated content or much known to many as UGC is any text or video messages that are sent between peers through their desktop or mobile devices.
In simple terms, chat moderation is a technique that acts as a gatekeeper to your chat platform in ensuring inappropriate or otherwise harmful messages are blocked from the user's view thereby maintaining the brand's reputation or of its users.
Why is Chat Moderation important?
Chat apps are paramount to building communities and a community is only strong when there's maximum interaction happening. But, what if your users do not feel welcome in their space? They won't interact, proportioning to a decline in engagement and retention rates, acquisition costs, and other factors, which for obvious reasons, businesses wouldn't appreciate.
So, here's a list of reasons that explains why chat moderation can take your in-app chats to the next level:
- Brand Reputation: Protects your brand from negative perseverance, improves brand awareness and helps build trust.
- User Retention: When a user feels the chat app is a safe place to communicate and engage in posts, the user will refer to their friends elevating the app's usage to the next level.
- Types of Users: With the types of communication happening within the chat app can hint at the type of users using the app. This info can help you bring quality leads to your chat platform.
- Data Safety: Along with protecting your brand reputation, you must also make sure to protect user data from any unprofessional moderation.
Now that we have learned why this technique is important, let us now focus on which content requires moderation.
Types of Chat Moderation
Just like we know there are types of communication, chat moderation also has its types. They are:
The major or a lion's share of moderation is required for reviewing text messages. Your tools should keep an eagle's watch on the subject, sentiment of messages, and languages used for communication.
In this way, one can easily prevent the harmony of the social community from getting disrupted. But let me tell you, this is not an easy task for moderators as with the volume of text messages transmitted every second, an AI's assistance would be of great help.
- Image Moderation
Voice chats are a popular form of communication as a user can change the tone, pitch, volume, and tempo of their voice making it fun and interesting for communicating. Unfortunately, it is these factors that also make voice moderation difficult.
Businesses also feel that moderating voice chats are quite difficult because of the cost and privacy-related issues. And, they consider that the best way for handling such situations is by using automated voice chat moderation features.
- Video Chat Moderation
Video chats are a powerful mode of communication as the strength of videos outcasts all other modes of communication. The information that users wish to convey gets easily communicable through videos. Further, it remains in the memory of users for quite a long time.
Though it has the power to collage users together, it also has the power to break your chat app's messaging experiences. Therefore, video moderations need to be closely monitored for preventing any damaging content.
Next up is, Top Moderation Models
While we saw different types of chat moderation techniques that assist in censoring harmful content, they can be grouped into the following categories.
- Based on the Execution Mode
- Manual Moderation- Manual moderation is a technique where an individual human resource carries out the task of flagging and reporting unauthorized content in the chat platform.
Many chat features can be implemented in the chat app that makes this work easier like profanity filters or letting users ban other peers when they feel the content to be inappropriate.
- Automated Moderation- This technique uses AI-based chat moderation tools to report abusive and inappropriate content that defames a business’s brand value. In this technique, human intrusions are not encouraged.
- Based on Content Reception
- Pre-Moderation Technique- It is a process that involves removing abusive content before reaching the recipients.
- Post Moderation Technique- Here, after a user reports abusive content, the content is foreseen and then moderated.
- Based on Social Communities
- Distributed Moderation Type- It is a rare type of moderation model where moderators are assigned to report inapt content before getting posted in the groups or channels.
- Non-distributive Moderation Type- In this type of moderation model, a group of members within the chat community are allotted the task to report flagged content in the chat platform.
Build or Buy Chat Moderation
Whether to build a chat app from scratch with moderation and chat analytics features or to buy a third-party integration has become a paramount question for all businesses. Though a homegrown custom moderation chat platform can be a boost to the business in helping them offer top benefits, the underlying drawback of it is the cost and other types of investments.
But that's not the case when you opt for a ready-made chat moderation solution, you don't need a pro developer to integrate features or strategic planning toward investments. With chat APIs and SDKs, one can easily build chat for android or any desktop app.
Build Chat App With MirrorFly's Chat APIs
I agree that there is a horde of third-party API providers out there who promise unmatched excellency in offering chat features, but MirrorFly - a global leader in Chat API service, outstands the rest with professionally vetted technology, years of market use, dedicated customer guidance, unique features, and added intelligence.
Their developers are trained to build chat platforms keeping the integrity and privacy of user data in mind and to implement features that don't disturb the harmony of the app.
Starting right from one-to-one chats to group texts, they have implemented text moderation in both Android and iOS apps so that your chat apps can see user retention.
Here's a glimpse of the moderation features they include in their APIs:
1.Manual Text Moderation: Their chat SDKs let chat admins manually moderate messages within the chat app.
2.User-to-user Blocking: MirrorFly's chat APIs give the priority to users to block other users in the chat app when they feel the sanity of the app has been polluted.
3.Ban User: When users are known to harm the security of the chat platform, the chat admin can ban those users from groups and channels.
Give Your Users A Safe Community
Whether you are thinking to build a messaging app with chat moderation features or planning to enhance moderation efforts in your existing chat app, remember that MirrorFly's always a backbone!
Regardless of the build vs buy chat API option you make, ensure that your app is safe enough for users to exchange their ideas and they feel secure and connected with your brand. Because, in the end, it is the user engagement that matters and takes the chat app to great heights.
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