Introduction
If you’re a marketer or a business owner, you may have heard, in more ways than one, how social media engagement and presence can help you with growing your business. Social media presence means “engagement,” with people online. This is how your customers, or anyone in the internet would build a relationship with you. Following, liking your pictures and sharing your content are forms of engagement. Plus point is, you can make your customers, your friends!
With building a close relationship with your customers comes User Generated Content (UGC). When you manage to build a friendly social media presence, there is a higher possibility that your customers will like to talk about you on social media — which automatically becomes UGC. Now these three 3 letters are a lot more important to you than you may think. So, let’s understand what user generated content is.
What is user generated content?
User Generated Content (UGC) is any type of picture, video, animation, drawing or even a review that is made for your brand by anyone except you. Anything created solely for your brand or even affiliated to you — which no one has paid to create — can be identified as UGC.
Whether it is a comment on a blog, a review, or an Instagram post, what is important is that UGC can be either positive or negative. It can be a picture with good lighting versus a blurred one or a review of how bad your product was versus how tasty your burger was. No matter which type you receive, these can greatly impact your business.
Research shows that customers spend 30% more money on brands they have interacted with on social media, and 77% of millennials have made purchases online or in store after seeing the product on Facebook. Additionally, 88% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a friend, with UGC seen online having impacted buying decisions for 84% of millennials. Based on this data, it is evident that reviews and opinions can go a long way.
How you should be thinking about leveraging user generated content
Making the best of User Generated Content (UGC) on social media will allow your brand content to stand out from the rest while positioning it to be a quality conscious business for your audience.
Many brands prefer to create their own content for their social media, advertisements or websites because they have control over how their products must influence positive purchasing decisions.
Over the years, consumers have become victims of false advertising to the point where “perfect content” is viewed as untrustworthy. Consumers now share their best and worst experiences with brands creating UGC as the consumers themselves become popular champions within the marketing industry.
So here’s why your brand should leverage UGC on social media:
- Promote Brand Authenticity — UGC is a strong pillar in promoting honesty to your brand. Once you leverage UGC for social media ads and posts, it automatically creates a legitimate and transparent experience for potential consumers that can generate conversions and sales.
- Create Trust and Consumer Loyalty — Building brand loyalty is important as it encourages long term relationships with consumers who repeatedly purchase from you over time. This often happens when there is trust and a positive quality of experience with your brand. Leveraging UGC on your social media posts and stories can help you engage with your customers that leads to building a positive impact on the customer journey.
- Help you Set-up a Content Library — Brands tend to spend time creating content to publish on their social channels. Sometimes it needs a lot of effort and can also be very costly. Maintaining a content library with UGC can help you save time when creating new content. They can be used as posts or filler posts on your social platforms whenever needed. The best part is, it is organic content from your consumers that results in showcasing an authentic brand culture and more positive returns from your customers.
Incentivizing user generated content
Maintaining a strong UGC funnel becomes much easier when your brand has an incentive system in place to encourage your customers to share their content. Currently, most brands do this by simply reposting or resharing content uploaded by customers on social media or by exercising some form of a giveaway mechanic. This usually includes setting up competitions where customers can enter by sharing content related to the brand on their social media feeds with a pre-assigned hashtag, or tagging a business’s social media handles on a relevant post. These techniques are starting to show their age and inherently become less sustainable over the long run especially for smaller scale businesses. For example businesses and brands aiming to even be moderately active on their social media channels will need to bankroll paid content creation operations at least once every 2 months with costs spent on each operation being anywhere from $500 – $1000 per day.
This is where platforms like Avocado Deals can support UGC management.
What is Avocado Deals?
Avocado Deals is a content driven loyalty platform for all types of businesses who want access to a reliable stream of UGC. Businesses partnering up with Avocado will be able to reward UGC from their customers in the form of discounts and other similar offers. This helps businesses gain access to a sustainable UGC funnel that rewards everyone involved. Businesses can also enjoy long term benefits from the sense of loyalty they instill in customers by incentivizing them to have repeated engagements with your brand through the form of discounts.
Avocado uses a metric called “Grid takeover” to gauge how well the platform is working as a UGC generator. Grid takeover is a metric that shows the proportion of content sourced from avocado to the total number of content on a certain partner’s social media feed.
Recently, content submitted through Avocado is slowly starting to take over the social media feeds of their partners, and the best example is the 15% grid takeover they have over Barefoot Garden Cafe’s social media feed.
Barefoot Garden Cafe has been an oasis in the bustling heart of Colombo for over 3 decades and has spent just over 6 months as an Avocado partner.
By partnering up with the platform, Barefoot has managed to tap into a steady flow of UGC and discovered that their customers are now engaging a little more with them not only on social media, but through repetitive visits in order to keep or improve their Avocado membership. This has turned into a healthy cycle of repeat customers and a steady flow of UGC.
The content sourced from Avocado also plays a vital role in social media marketing campaigns for other partners on the platform, like Cremalato, an artisanal ice cream brand in Colombo.
Have you considered using Avocado?
Avocado gathers UGC for partnered brands, has an easy-to-access dashboard, and sets up your very own authentic customer content library. For example, in partnership with Coca–Cola Sri Lanka, Avocado released a campaign which generated more than 5000 images within 30 days.
The system gives creators a chance to receive something in return for their efforts and have fun at the same time, while also improving repetitive footfall for partners. Additionally, the platform allows creators to showcase their talents and content while businesses gain engagement and authentic content. Avocado is a win-win for brands and their consumers.
If you are interested in what Avocado has to offer, head over to Avocado Deals – Content Driven Reward Platform.
