User-generated video content is changing the world.
The internet has opened up new ways for people to express their views, share their experiences and talk about causes that are important to them. Social media makes it easy for people to share their lives with others in the form of images and videos – from the food, they eat to the places they visit and brands they wear. All the talk, images and videos act as organic, online word-of-mouth marketing for organizations, often called user-generated content.
What is user-generated video content?
User-generated content or UGC is any form of organic content that is created by unpaid contributors like followers, members, customers, etc. From social media posts and blogs to videos, reviews, pictures and anything else. UGC is a great way for customers to communicate with brands and each other.
UGC is essentially unpaid promotion that a brand gets from its users, followers, or community.
The importance of using user-generated video content in building your brand
What could be more authentic than a real customer sharing their story organically?
People on social media pay less attention to what brands have to say and care more about their peers, community or other individuals on the platform. They seek and consume content that is personal, relatable and authentic. For brands to be able to effectively communicate with their audience, they need to integrate UGC into their content strategy and marketing.
92% of consumers are more likely to trust organic recommendations than any other type of advertising. By making customers a part of the conversation, you can develop an emotional connection and a human voice for your brand.
Whether it’s used to source customer feedback, testimonials or in response to a contest, UGC gives brands a wealth of knowledge on what their customers enjoy, unique use cases and helps gather customer feedback.
How user-generated video content is changing the world!
Customers are making decisions based on what others are saying. They are micro-influencers with their own network of followers, sharing more authentic and relatable content. That’s why anyone with a smartphone who has a desire to share stories is changing the world, one image or one video clip at a time.
1. Creating social proof for brands
User-generated video is one of the most trusted forms of content. It provides something crucial called social proof – when people shop, they go through reviews, ratings, testimonials and other customers’ experiences before deciding to buy. That’s why 72% of customers don’t even take any action until they have read a review.
Social proof can be built with UGC through testimonials on your website or Facebook page, through reviews and ratings from customers or when people who have purchased an item tell their friends about it via social media networks like Instagram and Facebook. Therefore, getting your current customers to share their experience with your product and brand is crucial to building social proof.
2. Providing insights into how people use your products
Have you ever wanted to know how people use your products? Well, that’s where UGC comes in. By analyzing UGC, you can help uncover key customer insights, ways to improve a product or even identify unique use cases. These actionable insights could be used to increase follower engagement and improve products, services and customer experience to position the brand putting customers first.
Brands should use social listening or content discovery tools like SnapSea to keep track of what customers are saying about them. Here’s how one of UK’s top travel destinations uses SnapSea to acquire user-generated content.
For example, Tatton Park, the 1000 acres of scenic parkland had many visitors posting and sharing pictures of their experience online but had a difficult time discovering these posts and acquiring rights. With SnapSea’s AI-powered platform, they identified top-producing hashtags, themes and keywords and curated a UGC board. They were able to find timely content that aligned with their brand ethos and acquire rights to reuse easily.
3. Increasing brand awareness
It’s difficult for brands to get people’s attention and get them to try their product or service without huge expenses in paid advertising but UGC is a great alternative to create brand awareness.
Customers are your brand advocates and when your customers post about you on social media and websites, they are giving you exposure to their peers, followers and network. It gives a lot of organic visibility to the brand from a credible source, helping increase brand awareness.
4. Creating awareness around social issues
Often, when there is a polarizing topic or a social issue people take to social media to show support and create awareness. As the communities are at the center of such issues, volunteers, sponsors, benefactors and allies actively use their social media presence to gain public support and gather momentum for their campaign.
Non-profits and advocacy groups use the community’s support to speak about their causes online to build support and share the impact they create through their work. The community’s posts, images and videos about the cause and organization and how they empower the community is the best way to convince people to support and join the mission.
5. Helping brands reach the demand for the amount of video consumed daily
Marketers struggle to pump out relevant and timely content on their social media channels consistently. Video content was the most preferred content across age groups and 54% of consumers wanted to see more videos content from brands or businesses they support.
To build a strong community, you need engaging, unique and exciting content. You need to provide regular updates and relevant resources. With user-generated videos, marketers can regularly source content from their audience. By running contests, challenges or encouraging content creation amongst followers, brands can keep the community engaged and add the unique and relatable content collected into content calendars.
For example, the automotive chain, Jax Tyres & Auto has a close community of auto enthusiasts. They wanted to cater to their community’s need for fresh content and used Vloggi to crowdsource video clips to build a library of its tyres in action. They compiled the best clips into weekly episodes, JAX Tribe, to keep their social media community engaged.
How you can start collecting user-generated content today
With so many benefits to collecting user-generated video content, it has become essential for brands to integrate UGC into their content strategy. The more relevant you make your campaign and incentives to your audience’s interests, the more engaging it will be.
Wondering how to start collecting user-generated content?
Here are some tools to help you:
Vloggi is a video collection tool that allows organizations to directly source and manage UGC videos with a simple link or QR code. Contributors provide consent to reuse at the time of upload. By creating a customizable landing page where users can upload their videos easily, you can build an extensive video library with clips to publish anywhere.
SnapSea is a user-generated content discovery and rights management tool that sources visual content for your brand through the identification of top-producing hashtags and keywords. It helps brands discover UGC video content from social media platforms and acquires the rights to reuse through an automated approval process. It allows sharing assets through the web, social and digital channels to create a visual content library.
What are you waiting for?
User-generated content marketing is a great way to build brand awareness, engage and create a sense of belongingness for your community. It can be leveraged in a multitude of ways – from community engagement, advocacy and event videos to testimonials and contests. The potential for user-generated content is endless. If you are looking to get started on your own UGC campaign, here’s how brands can incorporate UGC videos in different formats. Or if you need a little help to get your creative juices flowing, here are 5 user-generated content examples to inspire you.
Feeling inspired?
Get started on your UGC campaign for free or choose from any of these plans to find one that suits you best.
