UGC for Online Marketing Communities
User-generated content, known as “UGC,” is content created by audiences who follow a brand or community. This can be in the form of an image, video, blog, or review. Using such content is excellent for increasing purchasing confidence, improving customer feedback, and creating a more authentic experience. According to a Trust Index, 92% of consumers trust user-generated content more than the traditional advertising brands create and share. Overall, an online community can leverage UGC to build brand awareness, establish credibility, boost social media metrics, and highlight their audience.
When it comes to an online marketing community such as my own, On To Digital Marketing (ON2DM), UGC would come from the community interacting with the group. This could look like people sharing their digital marketing tips and tricks, and experiences within the field. Ways that I would get the community to generate user-generated content are through posts that prompt the community to share their digital marketing career journey with the audience, weekly prompts, and community competitions.
Share Your Story
A massive part of ON2DM is to share your story about why you’re in digital marketing, how you got there, and what you want to gain from the online community. I think it would be great to get individuals to share their personal stories and interact with others. This is a great way to boost engagement and allow others to share the spotlight and bond with others. Having such an icebreaker can even allow individuals to share some fun facts about themselves and what digital marketing sector they are coming from.
Weekly Prompts
One way to generate engagement weekly is to share weekly prompts that users want to answer to and partake in conversation. An example below is a post I did asking what the best tools are for social media managers. Social media marketing is hot right now, and many people are starting to seek online tools they can use to create effective and targeted content calendars that appeal to their audiences creatively. Doing weekly questions like this will allow community members to feel like they are the expert and that they can share a piece of knowledge for other community members to take advantage of. This sort of posts received the most engagment within my Facebook community and created a space where valuable information was shared.
Community Competitions
I follow a similar LinkedIn marketing community, Pretty Little Marketer, which creates monthly challenges for their online community to promote user-generated content. This includes getting individuals to share information such as sharing fun facts, listing things they have learned, and what their favorite pieces of marketing are. This is a great effort to spread brand awareness for the LinkedIn community and is something that I am interested in doing myself for my community.
Additionally, I would even create community challenges where people can earn certifications or learn a new skill during a month and then share with the community their experiences. I also think it would be great to see community members apply what they have learned from the group to their professional life and share that learning results. This can be how to boost engagement across social platforms, generate more leads through digital advertising, or designs they have created through Canva.
Overall, user-generated content is cost-effective and allows your online community and brand to connect with people easily. It’s more trusted and allows individuals to feel that they are part of the bigger picture for your communities initiative. It’s great for establishing what a community is about and bonding the individuals within the community together. If you are looking to expand your community and make it a trusted space, UGC is a great step towards this goal!
