User-Generated Content (UGC) rapidly became one of the most important aspects of »digital branding«. By definition, it’s the content featuring products people created on their own, without brands interfering in any way. This type of content is so powerful that 85% of people admitted they consider UGC more trustworthy and convincing than official ads made by the brand. 85%.

When online shopping, regardless of what the product, service, or experience is, consumers would like to know what they are getting before they purchase it. UGC offers a unique opportunity for brands to build trust and relationships with their audience, and has a proven positive impact on people’s shopping decisions.

With that being said, here are few tips from our team to improve user generated content for your brand.

Be active

UGC can be found on all social media platforms, with most of them giving you the option to easily re-share content tagged with your brand. Show people you care about them posting your product on their timeline, either with a re-share on your official brand profile or at least with a nice comment under the original post. Be careful as some content will only be available temporarily, like Instagram or Facebook stories. Make those 24h count.

Giveaways

People love free stuff. Even if the reward is not guaranteed for everybody, like in giveaways where you can only participate with hopes of getting selected for the prize, it still motivates people to follow your entry requirements. Pick few prizes and promise them to the lucky winners in exchange for the best UGC they can make. Make sure you communicate clearly how can somebody participate to avoid any confusion.

People love FREE stuff.

Influencers

One of the reasons brands are investing so much money in influencer marketing isn’t only the exposure the influencer gives them, but also the content they get with it. For the price of their audience and reach they usually provide you with many pieces of content you can later on use on your socials as well. 

GIFs, stickers, and filters

Companies trying to take the UGC to the next level are often investing in the creation of their own branded GIFs, stickers, and Instagram filters their consumers can later use. It gives their customers a lot of creative flexibility and provides even more opportunities for a branded content. Creating custom stickers or filters may be a bit trickier if you are not very familiar with graphic and animation programs, but not impossible. 

Instagram stickers are a great way to boost UGC.

Focus on the community

The beauty of UGC is that’s supposed to be authentic, original, unbiased, and not staged. Keep that in mind when your brand starts actively participating in UGC – focus on the community instead of on yourself.

First of all, always ask for permission (not only to avoid potential legal mess but to show the author respect you have for them.) Also, make sure to credit them in your posts, and even reward them if you think they’ve deserved it. Don’t be afraid to have a more individual approach and contact them through private messages if you think that person’s content was beneficial to you and would want them to do it again.

Build a content library

Social media algorithms are one of the greatest mysteries for advertisers today. Each platform has its guidelines and rules on what kinds of posts are favored by their algorithm, how much content can be posted at once, at what times, etc.

The odds are, you won’t always be able to re-share all of the UGC you see, simply because it wouldn’t be as effective. That’s why you should start curating your own UGC library, with permissions and author’s contact clearly labeled so you can use that content some other time.

If you are serious about focusing on UGC for your brand, you should approach it like any other marketing activity – set a definitive goal you want to achieve with it and find a way to measure its performance and your ROI. Do you want to improve brand engagement on social media? Build trust, improve conversions or educate potential customers? Without a real way to measure it, you won’t be able to know for sure what’s working and what isn’t.

User-generated content can have a lot of positive impacts and is something to focus on when thinking of your digital marketing strategy.