The Power Of UGC (User Generated Content)

[Greyhat]

Hey All,

Just recently joined and really excited to start the crash course as well as join in, learn and contribute to the discussion. Hopefully make some money along the way too

To that end - here is my first attempt at a useful contribution for you guys. It may be nothing ground breaking but hopefully I can inspire a few people and it's good exercise for me to start getting back 'in the groove'.

If you want to know more about my background please read my Intro Thread.

I have done testing and used the following methods myself with good effect.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 3/4 years you will have heard the term 'user generated content' thrown around. The advent and maturation of social media has created a never seen before dynamic relationship between business and consumer. We live in an age where one "Tweet" from a customer can make or break your company. A video on youtube can go viral and be seen by millions of people in a short few days leaving a permanent record of your brand for all to see. Social media has fundamentally changed the way we do business and how we manage our reputations and our brands - forever.

...
that's a lot of content.​

User Generated Content

A side effect of the Social Media revolution is that people are now creating, posting and sharing an inordinate amount of content online. After a while savvy marketers realised that this was a wide open goldmine ready to be exploited for their own profit and gain. Somebody somewhere coined the term User Generated Content and then that was the latest buzz word for a while helping 9-5 "marketing executives" look like they know what they are talking about in meetings. Did you stop and think about the impact of this? User generated content in today's online market is the single most powerful tool you have in your arsenal and if you aren't using it and using it properly then you are leaving money on the table. Any business can benefit from user generated content. Allow me to explain.

User Generated Content is exactly what it sounds like - content generated by your users. What's the big deal though? Who cares about some bimbos latest selfie or some YouTube video of a guy blowing something up with nothing more than a can of soft drink and a packet of mints? What does this mean for my business? How is it going to make me money!?

What is the main cost or time drain you have when launching a new site? Yes - content. Here are some of the benefits of user generated content

User Generated Content Is Free

Think about that for a minute. We all know you need good content to drive your business forward on the Internet Today. If you do it right you can have your users not only paying for your product / clicking on your ads or whatever it is they do that pays your bills. You can have them shoulder your biggest running cost too. Is that worth investigating further? Yes. Yes it is. OK your users might not be fine tuning your prime sales copy but they can contribute a lot and they will if you just give them a bit of encouragement.

Example

The Lad Bible

Spot the CTA?

Content is big business. The lad Bible is a prime example of this. It's not educational it's not even that interesting it's just pure crap from all over the Internet Gathered in one place.

– It is financially successful, making more than £1 million a year from advertising, and its 24-year-old CEO harbours a dream of it becoming “the next IPC Media” (a reference to the UK’s biggest magazine company, now called Time Inc. UK).

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmi...l-web-empire?utm_term=.lhrKwBXb6k#.xjwjv481mx

1 million pounds a year. From garbage content. Anyway the point is these guys know a thing or two about content and they are actively pushing users to create it for them. This is just one example I would encourage you to go and and do your own research, see what other companies are doing and work out the best fit for your own project. For the Lad Bible though it's a simple proposition. Employ people or have the users do the work?

It's not just on the website it's all over their social media. They are making millions from their users who are clicking ads on content which they submitted themselves! Genius.

Point is - do you want free content for your next project?

User Generated Content Is Authentic

The message here is trust. Trust is a the key ingredient in any buying decision / sales funnel online and offline. Trust is what makes the average Joe part with his / her hard earned cash. User generated content is more trust worthy. We've seen how UGC can save you money for your day to day content. Let's have a look how it can better sell your products for you too.

Welcome to the Twitter profile of "The Eve Mattress":

from the website:

your life, simplified
At eve we believe in keeping it simple. We start by designing beautiful products to simplify your life, and finish by making them easier than ever to own in your own home

One mattress fits all

• Finding the right mattress used to be complex. With hundreds of options, impenetrable jargon, and pushy salespeople it was easy to get lost.
• We set out to fix this with a radically simple approach. We designed one mattress - the best - made from the highest quality materials. Then we streamline the buying experience to bring down costs and offer it directly to you, at a significantly lower price.

Delivered to your doorstep, in a box

• The eve comes straight to your doorstep, compressed, vacuum sealed, and neatly rolled in a box. Simply unwrap the eve in your bedroom, and the mattress will expand to normal size within a few hours. This means you’ll never have to wedge, angle, or manoeuvre a full mattress up and down stairs or through narrow hallways.
• We offer free delivery for the eve. If for whatever reason you choose to return your eve within the trial period we will pick it up straight from inside your home, also for free.

What a fantastic idea! of course, the skeptical among you will be thinking the same as me wish is that the only benefit of this is that it can be cheaply manufactured and posted in a box. All of the other listed benefits are pure fluff. I have a long standing client that sells mattresses and I know that one mattress will never 'fit all'. Some people like them hard, soft, etc. But whatever, i'm digressing - they seem to be doing well so good luck to them.

Consider the following Tweet:

How would you feel if you saw that on Twitter? Meh is what I felt. It looks just like the other bazillion self promoting posts we all see every day. I'm a skeptic and there's no way you are getting any of my hard earned money just cos you have a nice photo, Eve! I don't trust you you are just trying to sell me something obviously.

Now this one:

Wait a minute. That's a real person! Somebody actually bought one of these damn things. They even took the time out to then tweet the company about it with a photo! Well - if another real person has had a good experience maybe they aren't so bad. They may be worthy of my trust. I'm glad to see a real person saying good things about the product rather then the company themselves. Eve mattresses just moved up in my book.

my point is that people trust the judgement of other people. Do you read reviews on Amazon before you buy something? Of course you do - especially if it's a big ticket item. When you are joining up for a new Gym to you read the website and take all the positive things as gospel or do you go and look for reviews and judge the company by what real people are saying about them online?

The Internet has created an environment where feedback about a product or service you are considering is never more than a click away. People trust that more than they do the companies. Good feedback from users = more sales. Bad feedback = well...

By utilizing UGC you can tap directly in to this human nature and give your trust and ultimately your sales a huge kick up the a**! Above we looked at how users can be a supply of free content for your online presence. This part is about specifically getting examples of people using your product and then posting it on social media for the world to see. This is where the real power lies. Internet users are becoming more and more desensitized to ads each and every day it's a well known fact. What sells today is UGC. People don't care about your professional photo shoot, your exotic locations, your supermodels and so forth. It's been done before. Anyone with a budget can do that. What gets a response is the ability to, in a subtle way, show people that other real people before them have bought your product / service and had a good experience. It's called social proof. Social proof is what will sell your product. On social media, content showing real people enjoying your product will outperform generic advertisements. UGC is your free source of marketing material. Not only is it free but it will outperform the stuff you just spent thousands of dollars on with photographers, designers, copywriters and so on.

How do I get my hands on this magical super content?

Starting this process is easy and within the reach of any business. In fact it's better suited to projects with a small budget. The way you get this kind of content is simple. You ask for it.

Example 1:

I sell t-shirts and merchandise through a website. In 2014 a website I started from nothing in late 2013 turned over a quarter of a million pounds. That's a lot of t-shirts! The bulk of the sales were through Facebook and UGC was the backbone of that campaign. One thing lead to another and I ended up selling out of that business. I have now started another similar site and it's up to £4K / mo in month 3 again from very little investment other than time and experience.

In every order that goes out I put a printed flyer which goes something like this:

Hey Customer!

Thanks for buying a t-shirt.

Send us a photo of you wearing it and we will send you a discount code back for use against your next order.

You can email it to: email@site.com

or send us it on Facebook here:

facebook.com/epictshirts

...and then loads of people send in pictures giving us a ready source of potent content for use in social media campaigns.


Example 2:

Hold a competition.

Hey everybody today is national widget day! Send us your best widget photos and win a prize.

Then you can be posting the content for weeks on social media and get one or two blog posts out of it.

real people can be seen engaging with your brand. There is nothing better to establish trust.


Conclusion

it's up to you how you do this. The point of this article was to just plant the seed with those out there that are not already maximizing the potential of their users. I could go in to a lot more depth but i'm going to leave it to you to ponder. You know your users and you know what will work best.

When I start a new project now for myself or a client I always think about UGC. How can we get it? How can we use it to good effect? The goal is to make it a part of your strategy and process and establish a steady stream for you to use.

Ask for it and use it to your advantage.

Thank you for reading my first BUSO article. Please leave me a comment with some feedback!

- G

 

[Ryuzaki]

I have a love/hate relationship with UGC. I no longer allow comments on my sites, whether that's native, Facebook, or Disqus. It might be a sign of engagement for SEO and for building trust and social proof, but it's also a major leaking point and distraction from the funnel. I guess that's the point... if you're crafting funnels it's one thing. If your game is to publish mass amounts of content for display ads then definitely allow them.

I prefer to use calls-to-action to get people to take the discussion to the social platforms where there's a chance new people will see it and join in on the discussion. When it's comments on site, only those on site see it, which does nothing to help promote your brand.

Which brings us to exactly what you talk about with the mattress Twitter posts. It looks one way when the brand makes a post and completely different, on a higher tier of impact, when someone else posts. Your concept of incentivizing social activity is a huge boon to anyone paying attention. You're getting social activity, social proof, and building trust all in one, while collecting material for more content on your site to only further perpetuate the cycle. Fantastic stuff.

The idea of creating a Web 2.0 platform like Lad Bible and Medium and others is something I've tossed around in my head for years but never acted on. The footwork of getting it started never took priority over building out a site on my own first. But look at something like YouMoz (which I hear they are shutting down)... you start a Web 2.0 UGC site based on the merit of the original brand and the incentive of having a post promoted to the main site. It's genius.

The way I look at this is have something like YouMoz on a separate domain with sitewide links back to the main site. As it gains momentum people want to post for the do-follow links. If you moderate and edit the posts, you can raise the barrier to entry so it doesn't become a cruddy site Panda hates. Then you can have display ads, sell ad space, etc., all off of other people's work. They then build links to the domain and it collects natural links, all which flow sitewide back to your main site. You can't beat it.

 

[Greyhat]

I'm the same lots of grand ideas never much action. Done well though you could certainly make a decent site. Thanks for you comment.

 

[CCarter]

I no longer allow comments on my sites, whether that's native, Facebook, or Disqus. It might be a sign of engagement for SEO and for building trust and social proof, but it's also a major leaking point and distraction from the funnel. I guess that's the point... if you're crafting funnels it's one thing. If your game is to publish mass amounts of content for display ads then definitely allow them.

I completely disagree, UGC gets more exposure for an article since the conversations stays focused on the topic and I'd rather have the engagement on the website versus on other platforms where I have lesser control. People will still talk about the article if it's engaging enough (Creating "Compelling" Content) on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and forums, but I'd rather have the main conversation on the article. It also shows readers there is an active community around the brand and doesn't make the place feel like a ghost-town. One thing I make sure to is ALWAYS have comments within the comment section, even if I have to "grease the wheels" to get things going - like writing polarizing content or comments in a way that creates friction.

 

[TacoCat]

@Greyhat Great thread, just what I started to do.

I just started an ecommerce site (launched 3 weeks ago) at this point I'm breakng even, but I know that a big thing is trust so I decided to create a testimonials section where I would post pictures of people that bought my stuff. Also since I'm selling only to my country right now I hit them up with text messages asking how was the service and if they say that it was great I ask them for permission to post that message screenshot.

Maybe the last one isn't pure UGC, but still they take some part in it.

Now I know for sure that I will be posting that stuff on facebook as well.

 

[Greyhat]

@TacoCat yes do. There are all sorts of ways to get people to send pics back and in my tests it's better marketing material especially on social. I like the idea of having a section on the website I may implement that : )