According to Hootsuite, user-generated content is any content—text, videos, images, reviews, etc.—created by people, rather than brands.
There are so many strong arguments on why brands should implement UGC in their marketing strategy – building connections and trust with your customers, having unique and personalized content, boosting social Media engagement, increasing sales, and so on…
Also, research shows that UGC has a huge impact on the customers’ decision-making process.
Netflix, Lush, Airbnb, Asos, to name a few, are some of the big brands that regularly use user-generated content.
UGC can be extremely useful for small businesses to boost their brand awareness and position themselves in the heads of the consumers.
In this blog, we’ll cover how Mediatoolkit can help you improve your UGC strategy.
Hidden UGC gems
People can post about your brand on social media and they won’t necessarily always tag you. If they don’t tag you, chances are you won’t see the post.
To avoid this from happening, make sure you’re using media monitoring and tracking all the relevant keywords for your brand.
Keywords should include your company’s name, CEO’s name, and names of other prominent people related to your company, your slogans, campaign hashtags, etc.
The better you optimize your queries, the more relevant results you’ll get.
In the feed, you’ll be able to scroll through all of the mentions of your brand and potentially discover the hidden UGC gems. To make it easier, click on the Show images option to get a better overview.
If a post catches your eye, simply click on it and it will take you to the original post.
Make sure to always ask for permission to publish your customers’ posts and when you publish the post, give them credit for it.
Create a contest and a catchy hashtag for it
One of the best ways to motivate people to create UGC is to create a contest. Many brands do this and if done well, it can really boost your social media engagement.
In this case, Mediatoolkit can help you with two things:
- Creating catchy hashtag
- Tracking the hashtag performance
Creating catchy and engaging hashtags can be very tricky. Luckily, through Mediatoolkit’s Word Cloud you can detect the words mostly used in connection with your brand, play with them, and come up with successful contest hashtag.
During and after the contest, you can track the performance of your hashtag across the web and social media and create reports in a matter of seconds.
Make sure you’ve set up your queries correctly in order to properly track the performance. And don’t forget to add # as well!
When setting up queries, it is wise to use Boolean operators for better results.
Use customers’ reviews
Studies show that before purchasing a product or service, 97% of people check online reviews and ratings first! That’s why you should encourage customers to leave reviews after they purchased your product or used your service. Studies show that when you ask a customer to leave you a review, in most cases the review will be a more authentic and positive review.
Online reviews and ratings have a big impact on purchasing decisions and that’s why you should use them in promotional activities.
If you’re getting a lot of negative reviews you should (besides reevaluating your product and/or service) check out our blog on how to manage negative reviews.
But, let’s get back to the positive ones.
Since reviews are extremely impactful you should constantly check what customers are saying. Whether it’s your Facebook page, official website, or third-party websites. As I mentioned at the beginning, sometimes customers won’t tag you, and you might miss out on great feedback that you can otherwise use in your promotional activities.
Mediatoolkit can make your review search easier with Automated Actions. With Automated Actions, you can categorize your online reviews in one place by creating tags.
For example, you can create tags for each third-party review website so you won’t have to manually search for them in the feed, the tool will do that for you.
As you can see from the GIF below, we’ve set up an Automated Action for the G2 website to collect reviews.
You can set up actions only for new mentions or you can click on Apply to old mentions and existing mentions will be categorized as well.
Most used channels among your target audience
With Mediatoolkit you can discover what channels your target audience is using the most. This is helpful because you’ll know on which channels you should focus more or focus less.
In the Advanced reports, you’ll find three charts that will give you information about mentions over time on a specific channel, sentiment from specific channels, and ratio of mentions on all channels.
For example, if you created a contest for your customers, with the Sentiment ration by channel chart you can see how customers are reacting to your efforts. If the sentiment is predominately negative on a certain channel, you should find out why and change your strategy.
To learn more about Mediatoolkit, check out our Comprehensive tool guide. You can find answers to your question on our FAQ page as well!
If you want to start media monitoring, sign up for a free 7-day trial!
If you have any additional questions about the market research possibilities, contact our Customer Support team through the chat button in the tool!
We’ll be happy to help!
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