Have you ever snapped a picture of a new purchase and posted it online? Or livestreamed an unboxing to your friends and followers? Then you have created user-generated content. User-generated content (UGC) is any content generated by product users rather than the brand itself. It also comes in many forms. It may simply be a comment left on a social media post or more complex visual content, like photos or videos.
Brands and individual creators have the opportunity to leverage UGC to further their marketing goals and connect with audiences. To help you get started, here’s our how-to guide.
Online is a crowded space; user-generated content can help you break through the noise. Users—whether a dozen or a thousand—can generate content at a pace that brands can’t always keep up. By encouraging UGC, you can cash in on new brand content without spending time or money on its creation.
What are the specific benefits of UGC? It can be used to:
Build trust - consumers are far more trusting of their peers than brands.
Find new ideas by tapping into your audience’s creativity.
Get your brand in front of new audiences.
Build relationships with consumers who are excited to interact with your brand online.
Reward your most loyal customers - these followers are most likely to create content about your brand.
Encourage more people to create UGC to be featured on your account.
Brands can use social media site features to repost or reshare UGC content with their own followers, furthering their reach. Whatever your marketing goals, UGC can be a cost-effective way to expand your influence and strengthen existing relationships.
So, what does user-generated content look like in action? Here are the brands doing it best and what you can learn from them.
People are far more likely to repost an existing image than to create one from scratch. Spotify understands this and so enters their end-of-year Wrapped feature.
Based on a user’s year-long listening history, Spotify generates images for a user’s top artists, songs, and podcasts. Users are encouraged to share the results, whether it’s their number one song of the year or their status as top 0.01% of listeners for their favorite artist.
Because the insights are unique to the brand, shareable, and excellent social fodder, users are likely to share the images the brand generates. In 2021, social media saw 60 million Spotify users displaying their Wrapped images, with the limited-time feature annually taking over social media discourse for the day of its release.
You know that tune you just can’t get out of your head? You likely heard it on TikTok. Some brands are leveraging trending audio features on short-form video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to encourage user-generated content. This works particularly well for musicians or streaming services that generate their own audio via songs or clips from television shows.
One winning example is Taylor Swift, who encourages her fans (known as swifties) to post videos using sounds from her latest songs. Upon the much-anticipated release of her album The Tortured Poets Department, her social media account used the audio of the lead single “Fortnight” to encourage UGC. She shared videos of a “fortnight” in her life with the hashtag #ForAFortNightChallenge. The original video accumulated over 100 million views, and sparked thousands of similar user-generated videos.
Creating content that’s easy to replicate—such as sharing clips from daily life—and pairing it with familiar audio encourages viewers to jump on the trend. Pairing it with a clear call to action as a hashtag is another way to invite users into the experience.
User-generated content doesn’t have to always be in your face. Rather than asking for content generation outright, some brands are more subtle in their approach. Duolingo, for example, leans into its memorable brand personality. This memeable marketing strategy creates reactions in users that prompt them to create their own content about the sassy green owl.
Duolingo sends self-confessed “passive-aggressive reminders” that play on the user's emotions. Their tongue-in-cheek brand tone of voice and social media presence encourages their language learners to match their energy online.
Users will often create content about the brand to get noticed by it, whether in the form of comments on the brand’s social accounts (which the brand will then leverage by commenting back) or tagging them in their own posts. Users don’t have to be in on the joke to generate content. The shock factor of this personality-driven content is enough to drive responses on its own.
This strategy works. Duolingo now has over 11 million enthusiastic followers on TikTok and counting.
Tapping into user-generated content is a tried-and-tested approach to generate publicity and gain new followers. However, UGC is just one piece of the puzzle. Another way to increase your social media engagement and hit your marketing goals is with Superviral.
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