User Generated Content is the key to thriving social media profiles for many highly successful brands nowadays, look at accounts like Bali Body, Kiss the Berry and Kynd Community to see how the power of effective UGC made these businesses a force to be reckoned with online.
Quickly, what is UGC? As the name suggests, UGC is content that is created about your business by your customers. Ideally, it is a photo or video of high-quality that is advocating your product or service and shared online with their community.
Reposting this content on your business profiles not only says a little thank you to the user for showing their support, but it also creates social proof for your offering, making others want to try it having heard such brilliant results by another user, and making them additionally wanting to share their own experience in the hopes of getting featured themselves.
There are a million and one things that could happen to lead a customer to creating UGC for you, but we have ten simple-yet-brilliant ones, that you can implement today that will prompt your customers to share their moment with their social media following!
1. Lead by Example
If you want your users to use your hashtag to share their content around your product or service, start using it yourself. This will build the number of accumulated hashtags and increase the likelihood of a user seeing it and including it in their caption.
2. Prompt Hashtag Use, Everywhere
If you want your users to begin using your hashtag regularly - they need to know about it. Include the hashtag just about everywhere you can think of from your profile bio, your about page, your Instagram bio, on your website, in your email footer, on your labels/packaging, on your stationary, your cover pages and brochures. Featuring your hashtag at every possible user point of contact will increase the likelihood of use and/or users searching the hashtag to have a browse.
3. Engage with them when they do
It’s essential to monitor and actively engage with users that mention or tag you online, this not only means you will be able to see high-quality shareable content coming in but you can start a conversation with your user, thank them for sharing and allow them to feel a little bit special. This is at the end of the day why they used the hashtag, so they could be seen by you, so acknowledge them.
4. Make it Gram-Worthy
Putting creative energy into preparing an aesthetically appealing brand, gram-worthy details or perfectly uplifting experience will pay off in the long run, cult-brands are known for their look as much as their actual product. You can implement this by creating labels and packaging that make your audience want to take a snap, providing the perfect corner of your brick and mortar or event that users can get their gram, making personalised gestures that make them feel special enough to rave about.
5. Ask them at Key Moments
There are key moments in your sales funnel when asking users to share content will be more profitable, include a call to action on and within your delivery packaging, on the bottom of your receipt and or on a thank you email post-sale.
6. Run a Competition
Rather than running a tag-to-win or email list competition, prompt users to share UGC within a certain time period and tag your @account, this incentive can promote users to invest more time and energy into creating high-quality content for your business.
7. Promote a Novelty Hashtag
Outside of your primary business hashtag, it’s a good idea to run campaigns around special hashtags relating to your business, create them to compliment a strategic social media campaign and ensure they are catchy and appealing to your users. Such as The Clean Treats Factory which began a hashtag campaign with #charliesballs, it saw so much success that they run regular campaigns with the hashtag and include it as part of their regular social media strategy. A good opportunity for this is for businesses that ship their product to users, create and display a hashtag that prompts users to share the unboxing of their package on social media.
It’s plain to see the benefits of stimulating User Generated Content can be profound for your business, begin implementing these tips into your content strategy today to truly leverage social media. To plan and design a UGC campaign with impact on your audience and return on your investment, book an exploration session with the team at Social Goodness HQ, email us at [email protected]
