Instagram UGC – A Complete Guide in 2024

Instagram user-generated content marketing! It’s a mix of the three most important elements for brands nowadays: Instagram, User-Generated Content, and Marketing. 

Why do we say that these 3 are most important or why do marketers need to acknowledge & leverage this mix? 

Since its inception, Instagram has seen tremendous growth and success among users and brands, which has magnified user-generated content creation and sharing. 

Whereas brands have identified it as an excellent opportunity to reach, engage, and promote their brand to these users with effective marketing. 

So, here we bring to you a holistic guide on how a marketing strategy for user-generated content on Instagram can bring immense value & success for your brand. 

User-Generated Content & Instagram

Instagram as a social media platform is highly popular, with over a billion monthly active users and over half a billion users active daily. This shows how big the user base is and a marketplace for the brands to showcase their offerings. 

The engagement rate for Instagram is also comparatively the best among the social media platforms. These immense users and high engagement rates are causing the creation, exploration, and sharing of Instagram UGC. 

But why are we even considering user-generated content on Instagram for marketing? 

Well! The answer is quite simple as user-generated content is the content that is shared by real people based on their real experiences, reviews, ideas, feedback, opinions, etc. with a brand or its products/services.

Explore More – How to Repost on Instagram

Real people sharing real brand experiences makes it the most trustworthy, reliable, credible, and authentic form of content that shows the realistic & influential information about a brand’s image, quality, identity, and authority. 

Therefore, Instagram UGC is the users’ content shared on Instagram that is valuable & relevant to the brands. 

Instagram being the visual content platform makes the UGC even more useful & powerful as the visual aspect makes it more engaging & attention-grabbing while UGC makes it trustworthy & influential. 

All these elements & aspects combined make the Instagram user-generated content a hugely powerful & result-driven solution for marketers to deliver successful marketing campaigns. 

Must Read – How to Leverage UGC In Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaign

Best Instagram User Generated Content Strategy

Above you explored why Instagram UGC is important for marketing & brands so here we bring you the best ways to create & leverage an Instagram UGC strategy. 

1. Formulate Your Content Plan & Objectives

Instagram is quite different from other social media platforms and it requires a unique content plan & objectives as direct marketing is known to be less effective. 

So, firstly you need to decide what are your objectives with the content on Instagram. These objectives could be to entertain users or engage with followers or integrate brand marketing as well or just focus on brand building or all of them together. 

Although most of these objectives can be achieved through user-generated content yet you need to create a plan according to your objectives. 

As UGC is hugely diverse & vague so it is essential to define what kind of UGC will be suitable for your brand i.e. maintaining the relevance of the content to brand image & delivering value through the content. 

2. Create Instagram (Brand) Hashtag Campaign

Hashtags are extremely popular and important when it comes to social marketing as the hashtags work as identification tags to the content they are shared with and also allow the users to be the main authoritarians of the campaign. 

So, you should create your brand hashtag & unique campaign hashtag so that it gives an opportunity to the users to participate in the campaigns and submit their valuable content to your hashtag. 

But Instagram is filled with hashtags be it branded hashtags or normal hashtags, so how would you be able to make your hashtag stand out and attract the users to engage with it? 

Your hashtag should be original, relevant to the brand/campaign theme, short but explanatory, eye-catchy, memorable, etc. having these characteristics will make your hashtag easily recognizable for the users.

The hashtag will also allow you to easily discover & curate UGC around it into one place without investing much time & effort. 

Also Read – Embed Instagram Hashtag Feed On Website

3. Encourage Content Contribution Opportunities

Even though you might create a hashtag campaign or plan to promote user-generated content but the issue is that if the people won’t aware of it and have opportunities to engage with it, your Instagram UGC campaigns will be pointless & impactless.

Therefore, it is essential that you encourage your users to contribute content to your campaign with different strategies such as gamification ideas or just plain engagement and interaction with the users through messages, comments, etc. 

Gamification strategies like polls, contests, leaderboards, reward campaigns, recognition opportunities, most active users, challenges, offers, vouchers, etc. can be organized around your campaign to encourage users’ content sharing. 

This will also increase user engagement with your campaign along with UGC hub creation.

Besides, responding to user comments & messages or liking their mentions & posts will also allow greater user-generated content creation and brand building. 

4. Filter & Share UGC on Your Profile

If you leverage the above-mentioned strategies, it will open the doors to valuable user-generated content about your brand but just collecting it won’t be enough, rather you should showcase it to your followers. 

So, from all the UGC that you have earned, you should filter out the best and most relevant content that matches your objectives & share it on your Instagram profile. 

Once you will start sharing user-generated content on your profile, it will help you build trust & showcase credibility. Also, the engagement will also rise with such interesting UGC posts leading to more exposure, reach, and growth in your followers.

The crucial part to acknowledge before sharing UGC is that you should get content rights from the users to either share their posts or rightfully repurpose their content for your campaigns. You can even tag the users along with your posts. 

5. Understand Audience Behavior & Interests

Knowing what your audience likes, what are their interests, what content they engage with, etc. can help you get insights into their behavior & investment patterns and UGC can help you understand that easily.

As you will garner more & more UGC around your brand, analysis & evaluation of patterns, correlations, trends, etc. among the content will show you what content you should promote, audience demographics, engagement trends, etc. 

These analytics can be leveraged to steer your marketing campaigns for more fruitful & result-driven outcomes. 

Also Read – Guide to Create Instagram Hashtag Campaign

Best Instagram User Generated Content Marketing Campaigns

1. Apple’s #ShotOniPhone

Apple, the global tech-giant has been using the #ShotOniPhone hashtag campaign for a long time now and it has been one of the most successful and influential campaigns around the world. 

The reason for this campaign’s inception was when Apple’s customers expressed their dissatisfaction around the iPhone camera quality & low light photography. This led to damage to the company’s brand image & credibility at a global level. 

Taggbox Social Wall for #ShotonIphone

Check this also – How to Repost a Story on Instagram

Therefore, Apple launched the hashtag campaign called #shotoniphone and asked the customers to share their clicked images & videos i.e. user-generated content on Instagram using the hashtag. 

This garnered massive attention-grabbing visual content which led to the restoration of brand trust, authenticity, and quality along with great user engagement opportunities. This UGC campaign is still going on after years and has been one of the highlights of UGC marketing. 

2. GoPro’s UGC Ecosystem

GoPro is probably the “Father of Instagram user-generated content campaigns” as all of their social media (especially Instagram) and digital channels are filled with user-generated content and they have made the best use of UGC through their adventure-oriented products for customers. 

The action-camera manufacturing brand has its marketing campaigns driven by user-generated content along with some influencers.

GoPro encourages its customers to share their amazing content and GoPro posts the best content out of it on their Instagram & other profiles. The best part is their product is meant to record captivating visual content and that they gather from users and leverage it. 

So, they have over 17 million followers on Instagram for their global accounts and millions of followers on country-specific accounts. 

The UGC is helping them build trust, showcase authenticity & quality, magnify user engagement, maintain content diversity, cost-effective content generation, and an overall powerful brand image. 

Taggbox – Expand Instagram UGC To Different Channels

Till now we discussed how you can leverage Instagram user generated content on the platform itself but then we mentioned examples where brands have taken this Instagram UGC to other channels like their website, social ads, etc. 

Expanding Instagram UGC beyond the platform presents lots of opportunities for brands to magnify their marketing campaigns’ returns & drive overall growth.

Taggbox as a UGC platform allows you to discover, collect, and curate content from Instagram using hashtags, handle, mentions, etc. into a feed and publish the feed on websites, live events, digital signages, outdoor advertising, or email campaigns. 

You also get the following features & functionalities with Taggbox:

• Customize your feed with creative themes, fonts, layouts, & design elements
• Moderate content to keep the best quality content & remove irrelevant content
• Enable real-time automatic content updates to your feeds
• Get UGC rights directly from the users with in-built UGC rights management
• Easy & simple integration with multiple marketing channels
• Insightful analytics to measure the performance of your feed 

The possibilities of leveraging Instagram user generated content for marketing beyond the platform leads to helping the brands to build trust, showcase advocacy, build brand desirability, increase user engagement, and grow conversions. 

Conclusion

This holistic guide explains how Instagram UGC can be beneficial & effective for a brand’s marketing & communications along with how you can leverage UGC beyond Instagram with perfect solutions like Taggbox. 

It is now up to you to start leveraging your Instagram user-generated content for marketing purposes with a wholesome Instagram UGC strategy and UGC tool to expand revenue generation & brand growth opportunities. 

So, get started now with your amazing strategy for marketing with user generated content on Instagram.