No matter what type of work you do, content is the driving force behind your marketing channels, from your website to your social media to your sales channels.
However, creating content requires a significant investment of time, resources, and talent.
For this reason, many companies incorporate user-generated content into their marketing strategies to save time, build trust, and attract more users to create videos, images, testimonials, and even customer support resources for their brand.
What is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
User-generated content (UGC) is any content that is relevant to a brand, such as product images, educational videos, customer opinions, and Instagram stories created by customers, employees, and creators instead of the brand itself.
Since your business isn’t the one creating it, user-generated content allows you to save time by adding user-generated content alongside your original content, interacting with your community, and building stronger relationships with customers by engaging them in marketing and getting to know them better, earning trust through social proof by promoting the content created by people about your brand, and leveraging the expertise of creators who understand what works and what doesn’t in content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms.
Types of User-Generated Content (With Examples)
User-generated content can be divided into three categories based on the type of “users” you interact with: user-generated content from customers, user-generated content from employees, and user-generated content from creators.
1. User-Generated Content from Customers
Customers are one of the strongest sources of user-generated content for building your brand. There is no better salesperson for your products than actual satisfied customers.
User-generated content from customers takes the word-of-mouth marketing that happens in private conversations and makes it public as content that the world can see.
User-generated content from customers can include: customer opinions and star ratings displayed on your product pages, unboxing videos created by customers and posted on Instagram using your brand’s hashtag, product images captured by your customers displayed alongside reviews, FAQs and answers provided by your customers where they can ask their individual questions and receive general customer support, and conversations from customer communities on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter where customers can interact and share content with others and engage with your brand.
Solgaard is a bright example of how to use user-generated content from customers. The brand sells sustainable travel gear and integrates user-generated content from customers into the product page of its main clothing bag.
With an average rating of nearly five stars despite having over 1,400 reviews, Solgaard proudly showcases its confidence in its products through customer-provided images of the main bag in use, reviews, and even a user-led forum for questions, where hesitant shoppers can voice their concerns to be answered by a customer service representative.
ErgoDox Ez is another example of how to build a community around user-generated content from customers. The open-source custom keyboard naturally invites users to share their thoughts, tips, and creations.
With its own community on Reddit, customers can share details about their personal keyboard configurations with each other – or even pictures of cats standing on top of the keyboards.
2.
User-Generated Content Created by Employees
Happy employees, like happy customers, may volunteer to contribute to your brand’s content.
The main difference is that user-generated content created by employees isn’t part of their job. This means there’s no obligation, making it seem authentic, and although it might not generate direct sales, it could encourage others to want to work with your company as employees or partners.
User-generated content created by employees can include: photos and videos shared by employees using the brand hashtag for workplace images, sharing company content on their social media profiles, such as major press mentions or significant company events, and announcing new employees starting their new role at your company through a LinkedIn post that their network might see and celebrate (or even someone leaving your company with a shoutout to the culture you’ve built).
Shopify employees use the brand hashtag #LifeatShopify when sharing their career life, making it easy to find and browse this content.
3. User-Generated Content Created by Creators
While the best user-generated content from users is often organic, you can also incentivize it through giveaways, contests, affiliate commissions, or direct payment.
You might know this as influencer marketing: paying a creator with a shared audience to create and promote content about your brand to their audience.
But today, video-focused platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have given a voice to creator content with more options to amplify it — where user experience on the platform comes first and influencing a shared audience is something beautiful. From the average user to the novice to the professional, anyone creating content online is a creator, redefining what user-generated content means today.
User-generated content created by creators includes: an Instagram influencer sharing a photo of your product with an exclusive discount code, a TikTok video about your product from a small creator, images submitted in a competition to your Instagram followers, where they compete by creating, submitting, and sharing content with their own networks, and a review of your product on YouTube, whether you provided the reviewer with a free sample or they purchased it themselves.
A user-generated content strategy from creators you’ve seen before is working with influencers that align with your brand to create product reviews.
Shargeek, the brand selling uniquely designed transparent power banks, worked with a tech influencer on YouTube named Marques Brownlee to appear in this video:
You can also find a clip from this video on Shargeek’s website, showcasing how you can leverage one piece of user-generated content to gain more value.
How to Create and Gather User-Generated Content for Your Brand
If you find that your target users are organically sharing content related to your brand, you’re lucky – you already have the fuel for your user-generated content strategy.
But if that isn’t happening organically yet, you can find some creative overlap between content that fulfills your goals and content that people actually want to create and share.
Creating a Brand Hashtag
A brand hashtag is the easiest way to encourage user-generated content creation and gathering it automatically, especially on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
This is because you can share it with a “call to create” anywhere you want: in post-purchase emails, social media bios, packaging inserts attached to their order, your online store, at an event, or through word of mouth.
By using
MVMT, a company that sells watches and accessories, uses the hashtag #jointhemvmt to provide customers and creators with a central place to contribute content.
Its Instagram page prominently features the hashtag, which is unique enough to reduce unwanted noise if you click to browse the feed.
Searching the hashtag allows you to see all your posts in one feed, making it easy to select user-generated content that you want to:
- Repost in your stories
- Pinn it as a profile story on your profile
- Add it to your product list in your Instagram shop
- Include it as a gallery of user-generated content on your Shopify store using a social proof app
Incentivizing Posts Through Contests and Giveaways
Contests and giveaways are not only useful for increasing brand awareness. They often provide an incentive for participation in user-generated content efforts.
A simple contest where users submit their best photos fitting a certain theme, for example, can help gather future content for your social media calendar and reward your most engaged audience members.
In the example above, Letterfolk uses the hashtag #LetterfolkDOTM to collect user submissions for its monthly design contests, encouraging participants to share Instagram stories featuring the designs they create using its tile board.
A contest campaign like this not only allows you to expand your reach through your audience’s social networks when they share their posts but also generates user-generated content that you can share on your social profiles.
You can run your contests manually using hashtags and explicit instructions, or use contest and giveaway apps to streamline the process and offer additional entries for completing other calls to action – such as creating a video and photo about your products or sharing user-generated content across multiple channels.
Requesting User-Generated Content at Marketing Touchpoints After Purchase
As you build your user-generated content strategy, you are likely to create a marketing wheel that automatically requests, collects, organizes, and displays the content submitted as user-generated content.
If you want new customers to create user-generated content about your products, the best time to ask for it is around the time of their order’s arrival and after they have had enough experience with your product to form a positive opinion.
These post-purchase touchpoints can include:
- Automated post-sale messages that reach their inbox after their order arrives by mail
- Product packaging and instructions on how to share your product after opening it
- Loyalty programs that incentivize social media sharing or leaving a review for points that the user can redeem on future orders (explore loyalty and rewards apps in Shopify to implement your own program)
Aloha, a company selling plant-based protein powder, incentivizes new customers to provide user-generated content by including a call to action in post-sale messages and encouraging contributions to user-generated content through two unlockable discounts:
- 10% off your next order for leaving a review
- 20% off your next order for adding a photo and video to your review
But you can go further to encourage user-generated content by increasing lifetime value through loyalty programs. Evy’s Tree sells luxury women’s clothing and offers different membership tiers in its loyalty program based on customer lifetime value.
One
One of the easiest ways to earn points in all categories is by sharing the brand on social media for 250 points.
Exploring User-Generated Content Platforms for Paid User-Generated Content
With the rise of more creator marketplaces like Billo to leverage small creators, and even Cameo to work with well-known creators, companies have more options than ever to connect with creators and influencers for paid user-generated content.
Paid user-generated content seems like a contradiction – user-generated content is supposed to be organic, right?
Most creators, no matter their scope or follower size, put their face or name out there for the benefit of a brand or product that aligns with their values. Losing their audience’s trust wouldn’t be worth it.
The Cameo platform is filled with examples of this new kind of paid user-generated content. Established brands have used the platform to run some of the most well-known ads in recent years that sparked quite a buzz online as it featured the singer (and recently known as “The Lord”) Snoop Dogg talking about the brand.
The satirical shop sells cheesy titles based on an old Scottish tradition where owning a small piece of land was enough to become a “Lord” or “Lady.”
How to Safely and Effectively Use User-Generated Content in Your Marketing
You won’t benefit from collecting user-generated content if no one sees it or if it lasts only 24 hours as an Instagram story before disappearing.
An effective user-generated content strategy maximizes each piece of user-generated content across different channels, audiences, and marketing tactics.
Get Permission First and Be Transparent About Usage
User-generated content isn’t yours. Unlike purchased media, which you can buy a commercial license for through a marketplace.
Be proactive in asking for permission to use someone’s content and be transparent about how it will be used. Get it in writing if possible via email or direct messaging, or include the terms and conditions for submitting user-generated content in a visible location on your channels.
The last thing you want to do is betray your users’ goodwill or find yourself in legal trouble just to use third-party content to promote yourself.
Most people will allow you to use the content they create if you ask them. If you find it difficult to get prior permission, you can always link back to the original source to credit the creator, but be prepared to remove it if they ask you to.
Use User-Generated Content as Your Creative Ads
Using user-generated content as your creative ads on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other channels can help keep a fresh set of imagery. It will prevent exhausting your ad audience with the same types of ads from the same creators by injecting a new perspective.
Even better, you can run approved ads to promote shared content on another person’s profile (they must be on a business or creator account) by adding them as a brand partner through Meta.
A “Sponsored” label will appear on the post in your audience’s feed, like this example below from Mejuri.
Leverage User-Generated Content on Other Channels
Reusing user-generated content is a missed opportunity. There’s no rule that says user-generated content for one channel and format can’t be reused for another channel, as long as you have permission.
You can
Taking:
- Reviews from your product page and turning them into a Facebook ad
- Tweets about your brand and running them as Instagram ads
- Unboxing videos on TikTok and converting them into Instagram reels
- Customer support questions and putting them on your FAQ page
- Instagram photos and adding them to your product pages
The sky is the limit. Twitter chose tweets about how terrible 2020 was and displayed them on billboards as part of a fantastic out-of-home advertising campaign.
Leverage user-generated content as social proof on and off your site
In addition to extending your reach, user-generated content can also serve as social proof to build trust with your audience on the platforms where you have a presence.
These digital properties are typically used to showcase images, videos, and brand-related content to site visitors. By formatting the content that appears in these spaces and framing it as a community showcase, you can use user-generated content to display your products the way people will see them.
Marketing idea: An application like Shoppable Instagram & UGC by Foursixty can be a great way to increase sales from user-generated content. With the Shoppable Instagram & UGC app, you can create purchasable photo galleries from user-generated content that can be added to your online store, email campaigns, and your Shop app page.
Make sure there’s a way to control the posts so that you only display user-generated content that aligns with your brand. Automatically pulling in content under the brand hashtag without vetting it is risky, especially since public tags are open to anyone.
Instagram pages are a popular place to showcase user-generated content, especially when people naturally capture photos and videos of products to share in their posts and stories.
This saves you from having to constantly create original content (as the attention economy requires you to post regularly), and can also encourage existing customers to engage with access to their audience.
It’s easy to overlook user-generated content as something fleeting. But as long as individual creators tag your brand account, you can feature their content in your stories. Many brands maintain a dedicated umbrella for user-generated content, like positive reviews, to make these stories last forever.
Cotopaxi uses user-generated content in “their good gear,” where it appears on their profile and highlights, organized around themes and campaigns:
- The tagged content on their profile features images of user-generated content from customers wearing their products
- “Día by Día” showcases customer content featuring their Cotopaxi bag
- “Quaranteam” displays employee content captured during the pandemic to connect the team during a tough time
Harnessing the power of people with user-generated content
Before you can earn customers, there’s one thing you need to earn first: their trust.
User-generated content allows you to harness the voices and creative power of communities within your brand’s orbit to create and share compelling and authentic content naturally.
Be creative in how you obtain and leverage user-generated content, and you’ll find endless opportunities to use it across all your marketing efforts.
Frequently asked questions about user-generated content
What is user-generated content?
User-generated content (UGC) is any type of online content created by users, such as reviews, comments, images, videos, blogs, and discussions. User-generated content is typically created by ordinary individuals, not professional content creators, and often reflects what people think about a particular product, service, or event.
What
What is an example of user-generated content?
An example of user-generated content is a review written by customers about a product they purchased. User-generated content can also include images and videos of users interacting with the products, or a blog discussing a specific service. Even posts on social media about an event or business are considered user-generated content.
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