User-generated content- everything you need to know about it!

Seeing real people as part of brand advertisements in the form of videos and posters is no new scenario anymore.

Most brands are employing their customers as their marketing cupids.

In fact, major brands are launching UGC campaigns to drive user engagement and spread brand awareness.

You must remember the famous UGC hashtag campaign #RedCupContest hosted by Starbucks. It invited it’s customers to share their creativity with the seasonal Christmas special red Starbuck cups. The user engagement that the campaign drove was enormous which finally resulted in increased revenue for the brand and heightened brand awareness.

Content marketers are increasingly incorporating UGC campaigns as an important part of their marketing campaign because of the benefits that user-generated content brings along.

This article explains everything that is there to know about user-generated content.

Come, let’s discuss in detail.

What is user-generated content?

User-generated content (UGC) is any content that is created by unpaid and genuine users. It may be images, videos, audios, infographics, comments, answers, reviews, or any other social media posts.

It is also known as user-created content (UCC) or consumer-generated content (CGC).

It is freely and easily available on social media platforms and other multimedia platforms. It is basically created or uploaded online where it could be shared online easily.

How do you discover or collect UGC?

User-generated content is easily available on major social media platforms. It could be collected from there.

But that might be a daunting task given the countless number of social media platforms and their enormous volume.

You could always use a social media aggregator tool that easily discovers and aggregates the best quality user-generated content for you with it’s advanced AI algorithms.

It discovers user-generated content from multiple social media platforms via hashtags, mentions, keywords, tagged, and other sources in real-time and collects them all at one place where you can manage and monitor your aggregated user-generated content.

A good social media aggregator allows you to manage, monitor, curate, customize, schedule, post, analyze, track, and do all other associated operations on the aggregated user-generated content.

What do you do with the aggregated user-generated content?

The aggregated user-generated content can be put to multiple uses.

For starters, if you are a brand with an official website or an e-commerce business selling its products and services online, you could always use user-generated content to display user experiences and satisfaction with your brand services and products.

You could also achieve the same purpose by displaying user-generated content on a social wall at any event or as digital signage or embedding it on your official website.

You could incorporate user-generated content into your marketing and advertising strategies by displaying user stories of their experiences with your brand products and services.

Benefits of user-generated content

Below are listed some major benefits of user-generated content. Let’s have a look-

• Everyone loves UGC- Not just users, even the brands love UGC. It’s beautiful, attractive, engaging, and fun.

• UGC generates trust- Customers trust peer recommendations and user-generated content more than any brand-created content. They find UGC to be original, real, and genuine.

• UGC Builds Social Proof- UGC allows you to display user-experiences with your brand, hence, this acts as a social proof thus adding to the credibility and authenticity of your brand.

• UGC Drives User Engagement- When users see your brand officially featuring other user’s content and stories as part of your advertising campaign, they also wish for the same. They also create similar social content and post it on social media platforms with your brand dedicated hashtags, thus, driving user engagement.

• UGC is cost and time efficient- UGC is freely available on social media platforms and can be easily collected using a good social media aggregator which comes with many other features. Hence, UGC is not just cost-efficient but time-saving too.

Over to you

The power of UGC is unimaginable. It comes with immense marketing potential that can make wonders happen for your brand.

The power of UGC is to grow in the coming years and it is the right time to tap into it and take a step back from the traditional marketing tactics.