Insight
Why UGC Can Amplify Your Social Media Efforts
Have you ever felt like your audience doesn’t care what you say, but who says it best? Using UGC as part of your social media strategy is a great way to help increase uptake and reach for your social channels.
If you’re not familiar with the acronym UGC, it stands for user-generated content. For social media purposes, it’s the use of sharing or re-posting content that was created by another user. UGC can promote your product or service, or it can be on a relevant topic to your industry/audience. In most cases for brands on social media, UGC is used when someone posts something positive about the product or service and the brand re-posts or shares the content to their feed.
You might be saying, isn’t this influencer marketing? While UGC can use influencers’ content, for the most part, UGC is more organic and candid than influencer marketing. We’ll talk more about influencer marketing as we continue this series, but for the most part, influencer marketing starts with a brand making a decision to send product to an identified influencer or opinion leader, or they have a negotiated contract for content from the influencer, all for the purpose of the influencer to create content for their brand.
For purposes of this series, we adhere to the main difference between influencer marketing and UGC is influencer marketing is usually paid and promotional, while UGC tends to happen without explicit incentives to promote products or services. Additionally, we feel true, authentic UGC is not brand-directed. If a brand wants to have control or some say in the production of content, we feel that is best negotiated in an influencer marketing contract.
UGC allows for a wider range of users to share brand content and can help identify key opinion leaders within your target audience to potentially explore influencer marketing with. Different types of user-generated content can help users discover your brand, increase engagement and lead to higher sales conversions.
Here’s seven reasons to add UGC to your social media strategy:
1. Add authenticity
It’s no secret people have a distrust of brands and companies. When you share content from users it can humanize a brand. Additionally, when UGC is candid, it allows an unfiltered look into who the brand is and who your customers are, which in turn allows potential customers see themselves associated with your brand on a level only achieved through key opinion leaders. Lastly, UGC takes your content from brand focused publishing to an experience with your brand driven by a user of your products or services.
2. Boost brand trust
Along with authenticity, UGC can increase trust. Your audience is more likely to take what someone who has experience with your brand says more than what you say alone. You can decrease skepticism of your products and services when users feel what they are being told comes without incentives and is someone sharing their real experience.
3. Increase brand awareness and reach
You should have a good idea of who your audience is if you’re using an effective social media management tool. But this doesn’t mean you will know every person in your audience. It can be easy to identify large influencers, but less simple to find micro influencers. When your brand is tagged in a positive post, take the opportunity to grow your awareness and reach with someone you might not be familiar with. In addition to your established audience, you are potentially gaining more reach through the user’s tuned-in audience as well.
4. Cost effective content
As we established, one of the key differences in UGC vs influencer is a negotiated contract. UGC is organic. While it takes your time and dedication to identifying and sharing UGC, overall, your brand’s direct costs can be low. UGC is a great way to add highly influential and shareable content to your evergreen content.
5. Increase conversions and influence buying decisions
Not a lot has changed in terms of the foundation of marketing over the years, but the tools used to deliver messages have. Brands used to develop, organize and create elaborate campaigns focused on a few key customers sharing their testimonials. Now, thanks to social media, anyone can share their testimonial in an organic, unscripted way. But at the end of the day, the premise is the same now as it was before: customers like to know who else is using your product or service and what is their experience. UGC can be very influential during the final stages of a buyer’s journey and increase conversions.
6. Flexible
The benefit of UGC is its flexibility for both the brand and the creator. It allows for flexibility in your content and schedule. Everyone who’s ever created content for a brand has come up with a great idea but there isn’t a way to translate the idea within the brand’s parameters or brand guidelines. And feeble attempts to customize the content to fit a brand’s guidelines results in low uptake. Giving users the rains allows them to create more authentically and without the constraints a brand has.
7. Identify key opinion leaders and micro influencers
Your brand should know who the large influencers of your audience are. But as influencer marketing has grown to what it is, even that has lost authenticity and trust with users on social media. In fact, there’s a whole “de-influencing” movement on social media today. Users have become skeptic of too-large of influencers who they know make a living off of selling them things. However, UGC is more organic and candid, and can help your brand find those who have influence without coming across as too sales focused.
If you’ve decided adding UGC for your brand makes sense. Stay tuned for part two where we discuss tips to add UGC to your agriculture social media strategy successfully.
