User-Generated Content (UGC) A Part Of Your Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing started with brands publishing their branded content to expand their reach and redirect traffic to their websites. Well, the tables have turned. 

With 63% of the world population (13+) as active social media users, marketers have started building new social media marketing strategies to expand the growth possibilities for brands.

Lately, user-generated content has been gaining immense popularity. We see a rapidly growing culture of common social media users creating diverse content, offering brands free access to the content they can repurpose.

So, the real question is, how does user-generated content work on social media?

User-generated Content & Social Media Go Hand-in-hand

User-generated content is the most authentic and reliable content you can find on the internet today. That’s because it comes from genuine brand users. In fact, 92% of users trust recommendations shared by brand consumers more than advertisements.

User-generated content is diverse on social media. It can be an Instagram Reel, a Snapchat story, a Facebook review, or a testimonial tweet on Twitter. If it comes from a genuine buyer sharing their real-life experience with a brand, believe it or not, it holds the power to influence the purchase decision of your potential customers.

When user-generated content becomes an avid part of your social media marketing strategy, it gives a human touch to your brand, and more users find your content relatable. UGC helps you to stand out among the competitors, encouraging prospects always to choose you.

Keep reading, and we’ll give you more reasons to incorporate UGC into your social media marketing strategy.

Why Brands Must Incorporate UGC In Social Media Marketing?

If you are looking for reasons for why you should leverage UGC in your social media marketing strategy, allow us to offer some.

UGC Brings Content Diversity

User-generated content is created by people who come from diverse backgrounds and have had their fair share of experiences with your brand. Their way of expressing themselves is also unique.

When you incorporate UGC as your main social media content, you get to offer your audience something unique and vibrant each time you share content. Your content diversity intrigues your audience who engage with you and always look forward to your marketing campaigns, accelerating your engagement rate like never before.

UGC Builds Transparency

With so many brands rising on social media, users find it difficult to choose. But when you add user-generated content to your social media marketing strategy, it comes with transparency and authenticity, helping your brand stand out. 

User-generated content is created by an experienced customer who is not being paid for it. They create it willingly and express themselves on social media, and that’s exactly what makes UGC raw. It builds trust among your prospects and helps them make more confident purchase decisions.

UGC Inspire Consumers

A common consumer finds user-generated content more relatable than any branded content. That’s because when they see someone like them using a product, the real-life experience of a peer inspires them and encourages them to tap the “buy now” button.

As per a consumer insight report, 1 in 4 individuals purchases after seeing a product in a user’s Instagram story. People look up to the experiences of the past users of the brand to determine whether or not they would want to introduce its products into their lifestyle; this helps generate a greater point of inspiration and engagement over branded content.

UGC Creates Social Proof

Social proof is a major aspect of social media. It is a mere factor that encourages content creation among common users. Whenever there is a new social media trend, we all have to find users and often copy it and create content around it.

That’s exactly what user-generated content does. It instills social proof among your audiences. When your customer sees user-generated content in your social media marketing campaigns, they get impressed by how you have given a stage to your customers’ voices. It encourages them to create content for you, giving you more UGC to repurpose.

Additionally, social media statistics hint that more users trust recommendations shared by brand consumers more than advertisements. User-generated content, with its authenticity and relatability, holds the power to influence the purchase decisions of your potential customers.

Strategically Incorporate UGC On Social Media

Now that you know the importance of user-generated content on social media, let’s look at some strategies that can help you to create result-driven social media marketing campaigns.

Repost On Your Business Accounts

User-generated content offers content diversity, so when you upload it to your social media business accounts, you can offer unique content to your social audience. 

It will encourage your customers to engage with your content and share it with their friends and family members. 

Adding user-generated content generates interest in your audience to engage with your content. As many people engage with you on social media, it reaches more people, helping you to expand your business’s reach.

Create Social Media Ads

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer paid promotions. These promotions are target-specific. You get to modify your promotions as per your target audience, with various ages, gender, location, and keyword filters to ensure that you get the perfect ROI. 

The drawback is that these promotions are accessible to every business account on these social media platforms, making social media crowded with social ads that users tend to ignore and skip. 

So how will you manage to sustain? Well, your answer is user-generated content. When users get tired of skipping the branded and other photoshopped content, user-generated content is what will captivate them, generate interest in them to engage, and take positive actions on your social ads.

Turn Your Social UGC Shoppable

If you are an e-commerce brand well-versed in the latest trends, you must have heard of Shoppable Instagram, Facebook Shop, or Pinterest Buyable Pins. 

These are some of the newly added features on your favorite social media platforms to turn your social business accounts into shoppable storefronts where you can turn your product pictures into shoppable, enabling customers to make direct purchases from the social media platform without having to go to another website.

Now, all this seems promising, but to generate sales, you still want your audience to trust you. Not to mention that it is common consumer behavior to look for reviews or real-life experiences before making any online purchase decisions. 

Why not leverage UGC created by your customers who have purchased with you and tag these posts as shoppable? When you do so, you eliminate your potential customers’ review-hunting step and prompt them to make more confident and quicker purchase decisions, helping you improve your conversion rate like never before.

Add Social Media Widgets On Website

When it comes to social media marketing, your boundaries don’t have to be confined within social media walls. You can expand them to other consumer touchpoints, like websites. 

In the marketing funnel, if social media is the step to reach your target audience, your website is the part where you welcome your target audience, as that’s where they reach when they want to learn about your brand.

Why not create a good impression and offer them something they would find relatable, trustworthy, and engaging? While social media widgets allow you to embed your preferred social media content on your website, you can use this strategy to leverage the user-generated content created by your customers to your website. 

This strategy will not only improve your social media presence but also your website’s performance and dwell time as website visitors stay longer to engage with the UGC.

UGC Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Always Take UGC Rights

Taking UGC rights from your audience before you repost their content is important. When someone creates content on social media, they are the owner of that content, and if you don’t take their permission before using it, they have the right to take legal action against you.

Why face any hassles when you can sign a user rights agreement with them and peacefully repurpose their content for your marketing campaigns.

Credit The Content Creator

Giving the due credits is important when you are repurposing your customers’ content. You can either tag them directly on the post or mention them in the caption. When you do so, your customers feel important, and they will always be ready to create more UGC for you.

You also humanize your social media campaign. When other users visit the content owners’ profiles and see that it is just a common user like them, it evokes their emotions. It builds trust, and they relate more with your brand.

Run Hashtag Contests

Running a hashtag contest is a result-driven practice if your audience wants to create content for you. The best part is that you get to direct your audience to the kind of content you want them to create and reward them for their efforts.

As your audience participates and creates UGC for you, it reaches more people and instills social proof in them to participate in the hashtag contest. So, not only do you get to expand your brand’s social media presence, but you also get to increase the number of user-generated content for you.

Collaborate With Influencers

Influencers are a major part of social media. 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations when making lifestyle choices. That’s the kind of impact these influencers hold. This presents a great opportunity to get your audience to create UGC for you. 

You can collaborate with an influencer who would create a video or picture with your products following a social media trend. Make sure to choose an influencer having an audience similar to your target audience. It will influence your audience to follow the trend and create UGC with your products, offering you more UGC than ever before.

Final Word

User-generated content helps brands connect with their audience better and create a seamless flow of conversation between the brand and its customers. Not only that, but user-generated content also offers brands social listening that helps them to understand their customers’ needs better and offer them better.

On that note, we reach the end of this blog. This was your intuitive guide on utilizing user-generated content as a social media marketing strategy. It’s time to revamp your social media marketing strategy with the UGC pallet already!

Don’t forget to explore various UGC platforms to streamline content sourcing and management for maximum efficiency.