What is User Generated Content (UGC)?

behalf. So what user generated content is, is not the stuff that you post, but the stuff that your audience posts or your customers, which probably are your customers, not really audience, but it's what your customers post, because in order for them to post user generated content about you, they hopefully would have used your product. And they would have posted some sort of a review or some sort of an experience regarding your brand. user generated content is not limited

to one channel. So you can find user generated content across Facebook, Instagram, your website, if you have comments on your blog, that would definitely be user generated content, reviews on your Google listing reviews on Yelp. I mean, the, the amount of the amount of media that can produce user generated content is, you know, there's a limit, but it's a very big limit. There's actually probably media out there that

you have no idea about. In fact, there are services that actually offer you the ability to get alerts, if someone else mentioned your brand, a big one that we actually work with is branch 24. And what they do is, for example, say your Doritos, and you, you put out a Super Bowl ad, what you can do is you can have a keyword monitor on your you know, you could on Doritos or you know, anything pertaining to your brand keywords, specific keywords to

your brand. And you could monitor how many people are talking about it. And you can see the impact that that type of media can have on your brand, when you can't measure it, as well as you want to. You know, that's like, you know, it's like Facebook ads, you can measure Facebook ads, but you don't know if someone else was talking about it. And maybe it doesn't attribute to your brand specifically through that

campaign. So you could set up brand monitoring for your you know, your your restaurant or your online shop with your brand name or something similar to your brand name. And it'll alert you and it'll say, you know, you there's been a huge blowout of monitoring for your brand. And you could really, really tell how well your brand is performing with these keyword monitoring tools. Because it really does help you see how much your marketing efforts are

being amplified. And that's definitely a form of user generated content. A tool like that will help you in discovering which user generated content is helping you the most, because you might be marketing in one spot. But the most of your user generated content is already on that spot. So you could dedicate that marketing to some other channel that you would have no idea about. That's why it's so important to monitor user generated content because you really don't know where your

marketing is hitting. If you're not measuring what's going on. How can you tell the only way you're the only way the business owners let's be real, a lot of business owners look at their Instagram or their Facebook and they'll say, you know, I didn't get them any likes. So I don't think it's doing too well. But

that doesn't mean anything. I'm on Facebook and tick tock throughout the day sometimes and half the stuff that I actually really do like I don't like because either I'm too lazy, or I don't want to get bothered with more ads pertaining to that because, you know, people are smart. It's Facebook's been around for a long time. So they're not It's not like they're new to Facebook and they're like, Oh, if I hit this like button, I'm not going to get more ads that pertain to

that product. You are because people retarget we do campaigns for our clients where we retarget based off of if that person has engaged with your ad or not. So a lot of the time you can't really go by measurements like that, because some people just don't perform those actions on your content. But what they will do is they'll talk about

it. And because they don't really know, if you have brand monitoring setup or not, but they'll talk about it, they'll share it with their friends or their they'll make a comment and say, oh, you know, at, they'll mentioned with the little ad symbol, they'll mention their friend, their friend, and they'll say, we have to go there tonight. And how do you know if that's pertaining to your brand or not? You know, that's why it's very important to set up

these monitoring tools. But in any event, user generated content, this is why user generated content is so important. Because when other people see on your page, what type of user generated content is happening across the online universe, across your brand, and across your Brand Channels, they'll start to see how authentic all of this is, it's not like you're putting out an ad, where you're on camera, and you're saying, oh, try our product, because it's great.

That's the equivalent of, you know, sitting down in a restaurant and you ask the waiter, you know, how's the steak here? You know, like, what is he going to say, he's gonna say, it sucks, don't get it, no, he's gonna say the steak is unbelievable. Matter of fact,

get the most expensive one. So the way you have to think about this is, if somebody else is sticking their neck out to let people know that your product is good, and they don't work for you, and they weren't paid by you, then that's considered great user generated content to take advantage of, because other people are going to see that and they're going to say, oh, and especially if it's like their friend, you know, they're going to, if you put out a post with a review, and somebody who hasn't

been to your restaurant, just stumbles across your page, and they see all that's my friend, Sarah, they featured her in a review post. And she said, It's good, it's got to be good. And that's it, and I just got a customer pre using organic content. So it's very important to, you know, is this a strategy involved, I mean, obviously, you have to look and see, you know, which reviews you want, you know, you kind of pick a star or one star review and feature

that. So, you know, you got to use your head a little bit, and you got to see which reviews are worth showcasing. And if people made great content, you know, on on their phone, like if someone had, if your restaurant, or let's just use a product, for example, if you if somebody made a Tiktok and featured and tagged you, and said, Hey, I bought this product from your convenience store, and it works

great. They're gonna mention, you know, and as I was in there, I wouldn't have known about it, if it wasn't for Bob, who had great customer service, blah, blah, blah, doesn't matter. If they tagged the product that you're selling, you don't care about that you care about tagging your store, and the experience that that customer had in your store, repost it and reshare it, make a comment on it, make a comment on that post.

So people know that you respond also onto that user generated, it's not just about using user generated content, it's also about proceed, you know, you receiving the content and providing feedback as well. That's what people care about. You know, that would be like, taking a selfie, you know, with a rock star, and he posts that you're gonna be like, oh, man, he posted the selfie with me. You know, that's like a feat that's like, also almost like feedback, like, oh, he likes the

selfie. You know, see equivalent, you'd be surprised you make a comment on someone's page. And they're a celebrity. And they comment back. Yeah, I'll make your day. Just, you know, that's customers, too. They're going to be like, Oh, look, the the convenience store, they liked my comment. So apparently, they care about what people have to say about their brand. So yeah, I mean, once you have the user generated content, you know, the next step is you

create content. And there's, there's an unlimited amount of resources on making content. Doesn't have to be a graphic if you're not good at making graphics. It could be just a post. It could be, you know, a picture of that customer. Or it could be a picture. It could be their content. You take a screenshot with your phone. Doesn't matter what the quality looks like, no one cares. Take a picture, do a screenshot. repost it and say, Hey, thanks, Lorraine. This is great. You

know, we love you guys. We love our customers and tag them That's it, that's a piece of content. And if you really want to go into more details on how to create content, you know, there's if you go on canva.com, I mean, they have millions of templates, like, and now with all this AI, you could just type what you want, you can literally type into there, they just released it today,

actually, not today. But this week, it's like a magic AI tool, you could type in there, you know, and it's powered by like chat GBT and all that stuff. You could type in there, review, post, and whack enter, we could even put the wording you could put review, post and paste in all the wording and whack the enter key, and it'll make a design for you. I mean, come on,

it's like right there. So just get that content, get it up, get it out there, and then see what your audience you know, responds with, and just add, you know, 30, hashtags, or whatever and, and call it a day. I mean, that's content creation. That's literally, like, if you have 100 reviews on Google, or, I mean, a lot of restaurants that have been open for a long time, they've 1000s of reviews. And that's just on Google, that's

1000 pieces of content. I mean, and, you know, you don't want to like, you don't want to drown your feed into user generated content. But why don't you make it a point to put on your calendar, once a week, twice a week, or three times a week, you put out user generated content, that's free content, you know, the word, you don't have to come up with an idea that day, you have it right in front of you. So you know, stuff like that. It helps you to grow your brand, grow trust, because now people

will trust you more. If you know, if you have no fear, you know, in putting out user generated content, people trust you more. If you need any help with creating a content calendar, for your brand, I'm going to leave a link in the description of this podcast episode, I wrote an article. And I'll actually show you how to like, go to Canva, how to click on designs and all that stuff.

It'll really help you in the long run, because no one has time, throughout the day through to, you know, to open up their phone, make a post, you might not have that time. So you make this on the time that you do have, and you could schedule things in advance, you use a platform like later.com, I mean, you're talking about for like their starter plan, I think it's now 15 or 20 bucks a month. And you can schedule posts, I mean, you know, you can't really ask for a better time to want to do

all this. There's just so many platforms out there that are helping business owners and content creators do all this. So as a business owner, who doesn't have time as it is to do anything, this will extremely, this will help you extremely, you know, it'll save you time, and it'll keep you consistent. It'll it'll, it'll make sure you have consistent content out there. That's really it when it comes to user generated content.

This isn't really a huge topic to really break down because you probably already know what user generated content is. After you just, you know, glance over your reviews, like I said, anything that your customers are putting out about you. You can use. And it doesn't have to be textual. Also, it could be a video, it could be someone who did a tick tock or an image just an image of, you know, a food that they ate, stuff like that, you know,

is a perfect examples. So a new a new feature that I added to the blog is you can bookmark and comment on posts. So I actually wrote an article on this. So that if you if you want to just if you want something to reference, I'm going to put that link also in the description. And you could you know, leave a reply, make an account on the website on the blog. And bookmark this so that you can

reference it later. And if you want to listen to it in the car, you can even bookmark the podcast episodes on the website as well. I made a feature on there so that any videos any anything that's on the website is bookmark Abul. So that's videos, blog posts, obviously, and audio like the podcast. So this will be on there. And let me know what you think.