Social Media Pros Share Their Best User Generated Content Ideas
Social Media Pros Share Their Best User Generated Content Ideas
Starting an ambassador program is an excellent way to increase user-generated content for your brand. These so-called exclusive circles help encourage your brand’s “ambassadors” to promote your products and services through social media content. You can invite loyal customers, VIPs, and micro- or nano-influencers to publish their content on different social media platforms.
Creating an ambassador program requires clear guidelines on what your ambassadors can post online, things they aren’t allowed to mention, and the incentives that come with being part of it. This strategy helps boost your social media presence while maintaining genuine connections with your most loyal patrons.
One of the best ways to increase UGC is to have a dedicated forum for it. This can be a place where users can post their own content, but it’s also an opportunity for them to reply to other people’s comments and questions.
This is important because it gives your users a chance to interact with each other, which can lead to some great conversations.
A dedicated forum is an excellent place to find new content ideas, as you’ll be able to see what questions your users are asking each other and what topics are being discussed. You can then use this information to create content that answers users’ questions, provides new information on a topic, or discusses it from a different perspective.
Start a conversation and discuss a topic with your followers. This will improve your social media engagement.
There are many creative ways to garner your followers’ attention and pique their interests. Polls, for example, will allow you to gather substantial data for your company.
Posting a caption and boosting it will make your content stand out and not drown in the multitude of social media posts your followers will see on their timelines.
UGC could include anything from reviews and ratings to images and videos and can be an extremely valuable asset for businesses, as it can help to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
One of the best ways to increase UGC is to make it easy for users to submit their content. This could involve providing a dedicated platform or creating simple submission forms.
In addition, businesses should encourage users to share their content by offering rewards or incentives. By making UGC a priority, businesses can ensure that they are making the most of this powerful marketing tool.
Develop a referral program asking customers to make product reviews or other promotional content. Offer customers a percentage or flat fee for any referrals they drive while resharing their UGC through social media posts.
Referral programs usually offer a mutual benefit or discount for the referred and referee. That alone motivates many customers to participate, but increases the more a brand sweetens the deal.
The referral bonus should have some congruence with your products’ price points. $25 off is generous with some products but may not persuade customers to take part if you price your products much higher.
We’ve done a great job with UGC over the last year in implementing a brand awareness campaign that is 100% generated by our customers.
As an online dental lab, we craft retainers, night guards, whitening trays, etc. Those products go hand-in-hand with smiles, which are the focal point of selfies. When our customers are shipped their final product, they receive a note in their package that gives them the offer to take a selfie with our product and post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag our company.
Over the last year, we’ve had so much UGC from this campaign that has grown our brand awareness. With so many people posting smiling selfies on various platforms, their friends/family see the post and our company.
Not only has this grown our social media, particularly Instagram, but it’s a great way to show happy customers showing off their proud smiles with their products. When they post a selfie with our company tagged, we send them a free cleaning kit for their product. Worth it!
These days, there are several UGC platforms to choose from so that you can boost your content marketing. These include Pixlee TurnTo, YotPo, Trend, and Taggbox. Personally, I’d recommend YotPo for its features, value, and price.
Yotpo has a free option for beginners and a premium option for $9/month. It includes a customizable UGC widget to create photo collages, analytics to see how your content is performing, and Instagram curation so that you can share your UGC directly to your feed.
Finding a UGC platform or tool that works for you will make it easier to share your UGC so that it gets the farthest reach and experiences the highest level of performance. With so many tools on the market, it’s hard to choose. You can try different platforms to see which one works best for your content marketing needs.
Your followers want to forge a connection with your brand, this is why they upload photos to social media of them with your products, then share them with their own followers.
This free advertising is helping your business to grow, but you can help it grow even further by acknowledging their efforts. Create a gallery on your website or social media to display all the photos that your followers have posted.
Use the best of them in your advertising campaign to give your most devoted fans the publicity they crave. As other customers see that they too could be in a similar position, you will soon see the volume of your UGC rise.
One excellent way to increase impactful UGC is by gifting influencers your products. For example, an app that provides remote therapy may choose to gift an influencer a three-month free trial and encourage them to review the services at the end of their program.
Choose influencers who engage with your target demographic to ensure that your UGC strategy has the potential to generate sales.
Collaboration through partnerships or sponsorships is one of the best ways to increase user-generated content on social media.
By teaming up with a brand, or industry leader, you will gain access to their audience and followers and co-create engaging content that encourages users to participate and share their experiences. Collaborations can also add a sense of authenticity and credibility to your brand, further motivating users to share their content related to the partnership.
For example, a clothing brand could partner with a famous travel blogger to host a branded photo contest, where followers share their pictures wearing the brand’s clothing in exotic locations. This can help drive UGC and effectively market the brand to the travel blogger’s audience.
One way to increase UGC is to give followers prompts. You can run a monthly series where each month you give your audience a prompt of a post to create. Then, once you’ve had enough entries, share the best three posts on your page at the end of the month or the beginning of the next month.
The regular nature of the campaign will get your biggest fans in the habit of regularly creating content and will catch the attention of other followers and encourage them to participate.
We did not jump out of the gate with a robust social media strategy in mind, but we have stumbled on something that has given us an idea of what generates UGC.
We started adding videos to show our customers how easy it is to assemble our products. There are YouTube videos galore that people created on their own to assemble every gadget and piece of furniture available.
We noticed that and realized that we should be the ones to direct that content for our products—and we have discovered that we get great content in return.
If someone thinks of something that our videos don’t cover, or perhaps if there is an alternative method to assemble something, they will post a video or photo in the comments section, which starts a whole new conversation and increases engagement.
Something as simple as posting instructional videos has elicited more business and strategic ideas from our team.
Leveraging User Generated Content Ideas
Now that you know what the experts think, it’s your turn. Drop a comment below about your favorite user generated content ideas shared by these experts.
