Have you ever encountered a company`s Instagram account and wondered how they have gained enormous number of followers, incredible brand engagements, high volume shared posts and loads of likes on their amazing images?
Conversely, have you ever pondered why your account isn’t gaining any engagement nor attracting new followers when you have invested the same equivalent amount of work as they did? and are you doubting whether you want to still continue with social media strategies even though you are aware of its benefits!
Wait there is always a solution to every problem!
What companies forget to understand is that not only gaining social media appearance requires substantial time and effort but also, identifying the right social media strategy to approach is the key to meet their marketing objectives .
Fortunately, in this blog I have summarize an amazing article that may bring solution to all the problems mentioned above. This article “How We Grew Our Instagram Followers by 60% with Users Generated Content” written by Brian Peters, explains what User Generated Content is and provides a 4 step guideline that illustrates what Brian did in order to increase his Instagram engagement and follower base by 60% raising it from 5,850 to 9,400 followers in just 3 months.
So what is User Generated Content?
User generated content is simply sharing your user`s photos, to photo contests, to company products and services as well as company reviews. The most successful companies on Instagram tend to search and generate the best User Generated Content on the web and featuring them on their own social media account with giving full credits to the original user.
Lulu lemon is a great example of a company that implements user generated content effectively. The company tend to feature photos of their users experiences while wearing lulu lemon gear on their Instagram account and giving the original user the full credit for the photo that they have captured.
Why UGC is important for brands?
User generated content is important for brands for two major reasons.
Firstly, it allows the brands to develop a vibrant and engaging community through sharing socially popular content alongside developing an authentic personal relationship with their audience allowing them to share their real life stories that they experienced with the brand (here the brand act as a navigator and guides the user journey).
Secondly, the implementation of UGC by many successful brands tend to have a higher influence on the purchasing decisions of “socially-dependent generation” which are currently in their mid-teens to mid-30s that have more purchasing power than any other generations.
Guide to Creating a User Generated Content Campaign
Now that we have some general understandings of User Generated Content and its positive impact on boosting your engagement on all of your social media accounts, then we can then move on to the implementation process. Within the implementation process there are four stages to complete and they are as following
1. Determine your social angle
Choose your brand voice, think about what makes your company culture unique, identify your brand`s point of difference, what compelling stories ours users have to tell, and finally determine how you want your brand to be perceived as. Remember as a brand navigator your only guiding the user’s journey so make sure you provide relevant, engaging user generated content to convert the users into customers.
A great example is @kayla_itsines, she is an amazing Australian personal trainer who is doing incredible things for her 10 million base worldwide clients through her social media accounts. Just alone she has over 5 million followers on her Instagram account, which clearly shows that she has established her brands social angle well. Most of her featured photos and visual content are user generated content which mostly contains shots from before and after her clients body physics, photos of super foods and meal plans, motivational quotes to keep her clients persistent to continue throughout their fat loss journey and engaging videos to kept her brand personal and authentic.
2. How to find the best content
Hashtags and contests with giveaways are 2 times tested ideas to get start with gathering UGC:
- Brand generated Hashtag: it allows people to easily submit their content and helps your brand to develop a unique voice and social angle. Ensures, when generating brand related hashtags, brainstorm hashtags relevant to your brand and develop the ones which allows your audience to submit engaging images to share their stories.
- Photo contest giveaway: this can be a great way to gather and share user generated content while giving back to active users. This is quite similar to brand generated hashtags but by giving out a prize could definitely help to boost your content engagement. Note: encouraging your audience to tag their friends under your posts comments section enables you to drive more traffic to your Instagram account and gain more organic follower.
Under Armour is one of those sccessful brands that has it all sorted out with using effective inspirational hashtags and photo contest giveaways. #RuleYourself and #IWill were one of those hashtags that went viral over all social media platforms. Majority of Under Armour fans that were struggling at a point of their lives used #IWill and #RuleYourself hashtags to show that they’ll overcome their barrier in life and continue to fight for what they want.
In addition, Under Armour uses the contest giveaways to give back to those who participate and engage with their content and gather more information about who they are and what their interest are to develop greater user generated contents to gain better social angle and build their fan base.
3. Searching for relevant user generated content with social media tools:
For a small business or newly entrant business it may take months to gain appearance on social media and gain enough traffic and followers to start generating engagement or sales. This is where using various social media tools could be the best practice to gain higher social media awareness and develop an effective social angle.
Hashtag searches: this strategy is the simplest way to find incredible user generated content. Once you’ve have decided your campaign objectives you can brainstorm hashtag and search for them and identify potential users OR photos to feature and analyse the performance through different metrics.
Instagram: Instagram is not a tool (it is a social media channel) but it offers very effective search and discover engine where users can simply search for specific keyword or hashtag of their interest and Instagram will automatically sort the results by “top posts” and “recent posts” making it easy to identified popular accounts that share similar content
#tagboard: it is a great social media tool that allows search and manage hashtags. It uses hashtags to search for and accumulate public social media posts being uploaded instantly within social networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Talkwalker: it is a social media monitoring tools that generates data for gender, distribution, geographic distribution, and sentiment analysis on your own and peer company`s hashtags
4. Sharing User Generated Content
Reach out to the owners and ask them if they like to cooperative and be part of your campaign. This can be done through direct messages, commenting on their posts, email, twitter, Facebook and any other form of communication channels.
Note: Brian Peters Recommends that direct messages on Instagram or personal email usually works best to get in contact with users.
Over to You
Have you found my blog useful? To what extend do you believe User Generated Content beneficial for social media marketers? please leave a comment and share your thoughts, I would love to hear back from you!
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Related Posts:
4 Excellent User Generated Content Contests Using Social Media Published by Dara Fontein
6 Interesting Ways to Encourage User Generated Content on Instagram Published by Brian Honigman
9 Marketing Tips to Increase Your Instagram Followers Published by Dara Fontein
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