The Ultimate User-Generated Content Guide

As a business, you look for ways to humanize your brand and build trust with customers. One of the better avenues to help personalize your brand is social media. With audiences becoming more hyper-focused, brands are seeing success on social by providing user-generated content.

According to The Atlantic, the average consumer is bombarded by more than 3,000 brand messages each day. With so many messages at their every turn, there's no doubt it's difficult to gain consumers' trust with your brand.

But effectively humanizing your brand makes you appear more like another friend in a consumer's social media network, instead of an in-your-face ad. For marketers who aren't seeing much interaction or social media engagement, it might be time to consider user-generated content.

What Is User-Generated Content?

User-generated content is a source of content crafted by a consumer, social media follower, fan or influencer that lives under your brand's properties. Whether it's a blog, social media post, Wiki, podcast, video or social image, the content is created by third-party users.

Businesses then use this content on their website or social media networks to promote their brand. Typically this type of content comes at little-to-no cost, which acts likes a free source of advertising.

But why would consumers provide this type of content and for free?

Why User-Generated Content Is Influential

Brands often look to content already created by users, so it turns into a simple “ask” to repurpose. Additionally, consumers love being noticed by brands they enjoy. Not only that, but brand interactions lead to serious revenue opportunities.

According to the Q2 2016 Sprout Social Index, about 75% of consumers say they will share a positive experience with a brand. Consumers are also 70% more likely to make a purchase with a company after a good interaction.

How User-Generated Content Helps Your Brand

While it's nice to know sharing one person's content on your social networks could have a great impact with that individual, you can't share everyone's content. The good news is there are several other benefits to user-generated content that help your brand. For example, user-generated content:

• Encourages more engagement: Consumers simply trust one another over brands, which means user-generated content gets much more engagement. ComScore found brand engagement increases 28% when user-generated content is used in product videos. Additionally, consumers are twice as likely to share user-generated content with friends or family.


• Builds Trust With Consumers: The purpose of user-generated content is to humanize your brand. And with 51% of consumers trusting user-generated content over information on your brand's website, you can build better relationships with this content stream.


• Provides SEO Value: Many brands don't know this but user-generated content significantly helps your SEO. Kiss Metrics found of the world's top 20 largest brands, 25% of their search results are linked to user-generated content. This means higher organic traffic and more content being linked to your site (more backlinks).


• Reassures purchase decisions: A long existing problem for brands is keeping customers shopping. According to an L2 Inc report, when consumers witness user-generated content while shopping, the conversion rate increases by 4.6%. Additionally, user-generated content interactions while shopping increases the conversion rate to 9.6%.


• Increases your follower count: Customers typically come to your social media sites for deals and promotions. But they also look for a better channel for conversations. Nearly 35% of people use social media for customer care. With user-generated content encouraging engagement, you're going to get more people following you to interact.

How to Deploy a User-Generated Content Strategy

Now that we know what user-generated content is and how it helps your brand, it's time to start a strategy. Just like any other content strategy, your user-generated content plan has to have specific goals and guidelines to work its best.

According to SEMrush, 86% of businesses have tried user-generated content, but GoodVid discovered only 27% have a strategy for this content in place. User-generated content sometimes sparks conversations, increases engagement and builds trust. But if used the wrong way, this content will have your followers packing up and leaving.

To ensure your user-generated content strategy is flawless, follow these eight steps:

1. Choose Your Social Space[s]

The first step toward an effective user-generated content strategy is knowing where you want to publish. Each social network has it's own unique demographics, which means your user-generated content isn't one size fits all.

Determine who your audience is by doing a bit of research. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have their own analytics features that help you uncover important demographics. However, these native sites only scratch the surface compared to third-party social media analytics tools like Sprout Social.

With Sprout you get detailed audience information on who's following you and how they interact with your content. These social media analytics can tell you exactly who's engaging and where. This ultimately helps you decide which social network to focus on with your user-generated content.

What Works on Each Network

Besides figuring out your audience, it's important to know what content works best with each network. For user-generated content, try some of these tips for each social network:

• Facebook: This network is great for sharing video content and stories about your brand. Use Facebook to post user-generated videos that can help the content get more viral. Additionally, understand Facebook is extremely saturated with ads, so your content has to stick out.



https://www.facebook.com/LaCroix/videos/10154178198955856/



• Twitter: With only 140 characters, you're not as limited as you might think. Twitter tends to be a great spot for images, so let the visuals do the talking on this social network. Adding photos to your Tweets no longer counts towards your 140 character count, so you have a lot more flexibility. Visual user-generated content on Twitter also benefits brands because of its shareability.



All aboard.