How To Use UGC Successfully Within Your Community
We’ve all seen User Generated Content (UGC) on our favorite brand’s social media accounts and websites. This type of content is posted or submitted by a customer/user of the product/service and reposted by the brand on their accounts. According to Hootsuite, UGC is used to promote authenticity, build trust, and drive purchasing decisions. UGC is great for brands and communities because it is basically free advertising.
Examples of UGC
Trading Tunes
The Trading Tunes community is composed of people who enjoy sharing music and curated playlists, chatting about new releases, and discussing our favorite tunes. The basis of this community allows for a lot of creativity for members to contribute to any of the following user-generated content concepts:
- #NewMusicFridays —
If you are familiar with the music industry, you would know that new music is typically released on Fridays on all streaming platforms. Spotify has a section of their platform for new releases, and also creates a playlist called “New Music Friday.” Additionally, Apple Music also has a new releases section, as well as a playlist called “New Music Daily.” A great UGC opportunity would be for users to share their favorite new releases.
- #SpotifyWrapped —
It’s almost that time of year! Spotify Wrapped is a “wrap-up” of the past year of music, and shares how much music you’ve listened to, and which songs you’ve listened to the most. Each ‘wrapped’ is customized to the individual user, and is unique to that person, which means each person would have something different to share. This is a great social-sharing opportunity and a great way for members to engage.
- Latest Purchases —
A lot of people in the music community still enjoy purchasing CDs and vinyls, and like to share that content on social media. A UGC opportunity for this could be for members to share their latest purchases as a way to show their music taste and their growing collection of music. A great example of this would be to create content such as the TikTok below, from TikTok user @brianbailone.
- Favorite Song of all Time —
There are millions of songs out there, so it’s always interesting to me to learn what everyone’s favorite song of all time is. This could be a great opportunity to get to know my community better, but also will allow members of this community to connect with each other based on commonalities.
The content that is curated within my community can be posted to my community Instagram Page, @trading.tunes, to entice more people to join the Facebook Group Community and to create their own UGC.
Learning From Spotify
In 2016, Spotify had one of the most memorable UGC campaigns, “Thanks 2016. It’s been weird.” In this campaign, Spotify wanted to find a creative way to interact and relate to its users by including statistics from the past year, as well as using names of playlists to create humor and relatable quotes.
Because my community is based around music sharing, I feel like I could take a lot of inspiration from Spotify’s concept and incorporate bits and pieces of their successful campaign into my community.
References:
Newberry, C. (2019, March 12). A simple guide to using user-generated content on social media. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/user-generated-content-ugc/.
Tsegay, Kaiser, Persaud, Fortier, & Vu. (2017, October 20). Case study: Spotify “thanks 2016, it’s been weird”. VETO. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://wevetoblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/case-study-spotify-thanks-2016-its-been-weird/.
