October 5, 2023 • 15 mins
I walk you through what User Generated Content is, why it is important, and steps on how you can not only find it, but take action on it so that your brand can thrive with authenticity and trust.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Joseph Pellegrino (00:00):
On this episode, I discuss how to
leverage user generated contentor UGC to boost your brand trust
and authenticity.
So the first question that youmight be asking is what is user
generated content. So youalready know about blog posts
(00:25):
and social media posting, thateither you or someone within
your business performs on yourbehalf. So what user generated
content is, is not the stuffthat you post, but the stuff
that your audience posts or yourcustomers, which probably are
your customers, not reallyaudience, but it's what your
(00:48):
customers post, because in orderfor them to post user generated
content about you, theyhopefully would have used your
product. And they would haveposted some sort of a review or
some sort of an experienceregarding your brand. user
generated content is not limitedto one channel. So you can find
(01:13):
user generated content acrossFacebook, Instagram, your
website, if you have comments onyour 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
(01:35):
media that can produce usergenerated content is, you know,
there's a limit, but it's a verybig limit. There's actually
probably media out there thatyou have no idea about. In fact,
there are services that actuallyoffer you the ability to get
alerts, if someone elsementioned your brand, a big one
(01:57):
that we actually work with isbranch 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 youcan have a keyword monitor on
your you know, you could onDoritos or you know, anything
pertaining to your brandkeywords, specific keywords to
(02:19):
your brand. And you couldmonitor how many people are
talking about it. And you cansee 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 measureFacebook ads, but you don't know
if someone else was talkingabout it. And maybe it doesn't
(02:42):
attribute to your brandspecifically through that
campaign. So you could set upbrand monitoring for your you
know, your your restaurant oryour online shop with your brand
name or something similar toyour brand name. And it'll alert
you and it'll say, you know, youthere's been a huge blowout of
(03:08):
monitoring for your brand. Andyou could really, really tell
how well your brand isperforming with these keyword
monitoring tools. Because itreally does help you see how
much your marketing efforts arebeing amplified. And that's
definitely a form of usergenerated content. A tool like
that will help you indiscovering which user generated
(03:32):
content is helping you the most,because you might be marketing
in one spot. But the most ofyour user generated content is
already on that spot. So youcould dedicate that marketing to
some other channel that youwould have no idea about. That's
why it's so important to monitoruser generated content because
(03:55):
you really don't know where yourmarketing is hitting. If you're
not measuring what's going on.
How can you tell the only wayyou're the only way the business
owners let's be real, a lot ofbusiness owners look at their
Instagram or their Facebook andthey'll say, you know, I didn't
get them any likes. So I don'tthink it's doing too well. But
(04:15):
that doesn't mean anything. I'mon Facebook and tick tock
throughout the day sometimes andhalf the stuff that I actually
really do like I don't likebecause either I'm too lazy, or
I don't want to get botheredwith more ads pertaining to that
because, you know, people aresmart. It's Facebook's been
around for a long time. Sothey're not It's not like
(04:38):
they're new to Facebook andthey're like, Oh, if I hit this
like button, I'm not going toget more ads that pertain to
that product. You are becausepeople retarget we do campaigns
for our clients where weretarget based off of if that
person has engaged with your ador not. So a lot of the time you
can't really go by measurementslike that, because some people
(05:00):
just don't perform those actionson your content. But what they
will do is they'll talk aboutit. And because they don't
really know, if you have brandmonitoring setup or not, but
they'll talk about it, they'llshare it with their friends or
their they'll make a comment andsay, oh, you know, at, they'll
mentioned with the little adsymbol, they'll mention their
(05:22):
friend, their friend, andthey'll say, we have to go there
tonight. And how do you know ifthat's pertaining to your brand
or not? You know, that's whyit's very important to set up
these monitoring tools. But inany event, user generated
content, this is why usergenerated content is so
important. Because when otherpeople see on your page, what
(05:44):
type of user generated contentis happening across the online
universe, across your brand, andacross your Brand Channels,
they'll start to see howauthentic all of this is, it's
not like you're putting out anad, where you're on camera, and
(06:05):
you're saying, oh, try ourproduct, because it's great.
That's the equivalent of, youknow, sitting down in a
restaurant and you ask thewaiter, you know, how's the
steak here? You know, like, whatis 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 aboutthis is, if somebody else is
(06:29):
sticking their neck out to letpeople know that your product is
good, and they don't work foryou, and they weren't paid by
you, then that's consideredgreat user generated content to
take advantage of, because otherpeople are going to see that and
they're going to say, oh, andespecially if it's like their
friend, you know, they're goingto, if you put out a post with a
(06:50):
review, and somebody who hasn'tbeen to your restaurant, just
stumbles across your page, andthey see all that's my friend,
Sarah, they featured her in areview post. And she said, It's
good, it's got to be good. Andthat's it, and I just got a
customer pre using organiccontent. So it's very important
(07:11):
to, you know, is this a strategyinvolved, I mean, obviously, you
have to look and see, you know,which reviews you want, you
know, you kind of pick a star orone star review and feature
that. So, you know, you got touse your head a little bit, and
you got to see which reviews areworth showcasing. And if people
made great content, you know, onon their phone, like if someone
(07:35):
had, if your restaurant, orlet's just use a product, for
example, if you if somebody madea Tiktok and featured and tagged
you, and said, Hey, I boughtthis product from your
convenience store, and it worksgreat. They're gonna mention,
you know, and as I was in there,I wouldn't have known about it,
(08:00):
if it wasn't for Bob, who hadgreat customer service, blah,
blah, blah, doesn't matter. Ifthey tagged the product that
you're selling, you don't careabout that you care about
tagging your store, and theexperience that that customer
had in your store, repost it andreshare it, make a comment on
it, make a comment on that post.
(08:21):
So people know that you respondalso onto that user generated,
it's not just about using usergenerated content, it's also
about proceed, you know, youreceiving 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
(08:44):
a rock star, and he posts thatyou're gonna be like, oh, man,
he posted the selfie with me.
You know, that's like a featthat's like, also almost like
feedback, like, oh, he likes theselfie. You know, see
equivalent, you'd be surprisedyou make a comment on someone's
page. And they're a celebrity.
And they comment back. Yeah,I'll make your day. Just, you
(09:04):
know, that's customers, too.
They're going to be like, Oh,look, the the convenience store,
they liked my comment. Soapparently, they care about what
people have to say about theirbrand. 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
(09:27):
resources on making content.
Doesn't have to be a graphic ifyou're not good at making
graphics. It could be just apost. It could be, you know, a
picture of that customer. Or itcould be a picture. It could be
their content. You take ascreenshot with your phone.
Doesn't matter what the qualitylooks like, no one cares. Take a
(09:49):
picture, do a screenshot. repostit and say, Hey, thanks,
Lorraine. This is great. Youknow, we love you guys. We love
our customers and tag themThat's it, that's a piece of
content. And if you really wantto go into more details on how
to create content,you know, there's if you go on
canva.com, I mean, they havemillions of templates, like, and
(10:12):
now with all this AI, you couldjust type what you want, you can
literally type into there, theyjust released it today,
actually, not today. But thisweek, it's like a magic AI tool,
you could type in there, youknow, and it's powered by like
chat GBT and all that stuff. Youcould type in there, review,
(10:33):
post, and whack enter, we couldeven put the wording you could
put review, post and paste inall the wording and whack the
enter key, and it'll make adesign for you. I mean, come on,
it's like right there. So justget that content, get it up, get
it out there, and then see whatyour audience you know, responds
with, and just add, you know,30, hashtags, or whatever and,
(10:56):
and call it a day. I mean,that's content creation. That's
literally, like, if you have 100reviews on Google, or, I mean, a
lot of restaurants that havebeen open for a long time,
they've 1000s of reviews. Andthat's just on Google, that's
1000 pieces of content. I mean,and, you know, you don't want to
(11:16):
like, you don't want to drownyour feed into user generated
content. But why don't you makeit a point to put on your
calendar, once a week, twice aweek, or three times a week, you
put out user generated content,that's free content, you know,
the word, you don't have to comeup with an idea that day, you
have it right in front of you.
(11:39):
So you know, stuff like that. Ithelps you to grow your brand,
grow trust, because now peoplewill trust you more. If you
know, if you have no fear, youknow, in putting out user
generated content, people trustyou more. If you need any help
(12:01):
with creating a contentcalendar, for your brand, I'm
going to leave a link in thedescription of this podcast
episode, I wrote an article. AndI'll actually show you how to
like, go to Canva, how to clickon designs and all that stuff.
It'll really help you in thelong run, because no one has
(12:22):
time, throughout the day throughto, you know, to open up their
phone, make a post, you mightnot have that time. So you make
this on the time that you dohave, and you could schedule
things in advance, you use aplatform like later.com, I mean,
you're talking about for liketheir starter plan, I think it's
(12:43):
now 15 or 20 bucks a month. Andyou can schedule posts, I mean,
you know, you can't really askfor a better time to want to do
all this. There's just so manyplatforms out there that are
helping business owners andcontent creators do all this. So
as a business owner, who doesn'thave time as it is to do
(13:04):
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 youhave consistent content out
there. That's really it when itcomes to user generated content.
This isn't really a huge topicto really break down because you
(13:27):
probably already know what usergenerated content is. After you
just, you know, glance over yourreviews, like I said, anything
that your customers are puttingout about you. You can use. And
it doesn't have to be textual.
Also, it could be a video, itcould be someone who did a tick
tock or an image just an imageof, you know, a food that they
(13:51):
ate, stuff like that, you know,is a perfect examples. So a new
a new feature that I added tothe blog is you can bookmark and
comment on posts. So I actuallywrote an article on this. So
that if you if you want to justif you want something to
(14:16):
reference, I'm going to put thatlink also in the description.
And you could you know, leave areply, make an account on the
website on the blog. Andbookmark this so that you can
reference it later. And if youwant to listen to it in the car,
you can even bookmark thepodcast episodes on the website
as well. I made a feature onthere so that any videos any
(14:39):
anything that's on the websiteis bookmark Abul. So that's
videos, blog posts, obviously,and audio like the podcast. So
this will be on there. And letme know what you think.
On this episode, I discuss how to
leverage user generated contentor UGC to boost your brand trust
and authenticity.
So the first question that youmight be asking is what is user
generated content. So youalready know about blog posts
(00:25):
and social media posting, thateither you or someone within
your business performs on yourbehalf. So what user generated
content is, is not the stuffthat you post, but the stuff
that your audience posts or yourcustomers, which probably are
your customers, not reallyaudience, but it's what your
(00:48):
customers post, because in orderfor them to post user generated
content about you, theyhopefully would have used your
product. And they would haveposted some sort of a review or
some sort of an experienceregarding your brand. user
generated content is not limitedto one channel. So you can find
(01:13):
user generated content acrossFacebook, Instagram, your
website, if you have comments onyour 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
(01:35):
media that can produce usergenerated content is, you know,
there's a limit, but it's a verybig limit. There's actually
probably media out there thatyou have no idea about. In fact,
there are services that actuallyoffer you the ability to get
alerts, if someone elsementioned your brand, a big one
(01:57):
that we actually work with isbranch 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 youcan have a keyword monitor on
your you know, you could onDoritos or you know, anything
pertaining to your brandkeywords, specific keywords to
(02:19):
your brand. And you couldmonitor how many people are
talking about it. And you cansee 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 measureFacebook ads, but you don't know
if someone else was talkingabout it. And maybe it doesn't
(02:42):
attribute to your brandspecifically through that
campaign. So you could set upbrand monitoring for your you
know, your your restaurant oryour online shop with your brand
name or something similar toyour brand name. And it'll alert
you and it'll say, you know, youthere's been a huge blowout of
(03:08):
monitoring for your brand. Andyou could really, really tell
how well your brand isperforming with these keyword
monitoring tools. Because itreally does help you see how
much your marketing efforts arebeing amplified. And that's
definitely a form of usergenerated content. A tool like
that will help you indiscovering which user generated
(03:32):
content is helping you the most,because you might be marketing
in one spot. But the most ofyour user generated content is
already on that spot. So youcould dedicate that marketing to
some other channel that youwould have no idea about. That's
why it's so important to monitoruser generated content because
(03:55):
you really don't know where yourmarketing is hitting. If you're
not measuring what's going on.
How can you tell the only wayyou're the only way the business
owners let's be real, a lot ofbusiness owners look at their
Instagram or their Facebook andthey'll say, you know, I didn't
get them any likes. So I don'tthink it's doing too well. But
(04:15):
that doesn't mean anything. I'mon Facebook and tick tock
throughout the day sometimes andhalf the stuff that I actually
really do like I don't likebecause either I'm too lazy, or
I don't want to get botheredwith more ads pertaining to that
because, you know, people aresmart. It's Facebook's been
around for a long time. Sothey're not It's not like
(04:38):
they're new to Facebook andthey're like, Oh, if I hit this
like button, I'm not going toget more ads that pertain to
that product. You are becausepeople retarget we do campaigns
for our clients where weretarget based off of if that
person has engaged with your ador not. So a lot of the time you
can't really go by measurementslike that, because some people
(05:00):
just don't perform those actionson your content. But what they
will do is they'll talk aboutit. And because they don't
really know, if you have brandmonitoring setup or not, but
they'll talk about it, they'llshare it with their friends or
their they'll make a comment andsay, oh, you know, at, they'll
mentioned with the little adsymbol, they'll mention their
(05:22):
friend, their friend, andthey'll say, we have to go there
tonight. And how do you know ifthat's pertaining to your brand
or not? You know, that's whyit's very important to set up
these monitoring tools. But inany event, user generated
content, this is why usergenerated content is so
important. Because when otherpeople see on your page, what
(05:44):
type of user generated contentis happening across the online
universe, across your brand, andacross your Brand Channels,
they'll start to see howauthentic all of this is, it's
not like you're putting out anad, where you're on camera, and
(06:05):
you're saying, oh, try ourproduct, because it's great.
That's the equivalent of, youknow, sitting down in a
restaurant and you ask thewaiter, you know, how's the
steak here? You know, like, whatis 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 aboutthis is, if somebody else is
(06:29):
sticking their neck out to letpeople know that your product is
good, and they don't work foryou, and they weren't paid by
you, then that's consideredgreat user generated content to
take advantage of, because otherpeople are going to see that and
they're going to say, oh, andespecially if it's like their
friend, you know, they're goingto, if you put out a post with a
(06:50):
review, and somebody who hasn'tbeen to your restaurant, just
stumbles across your page, andthey see all that's my friend,
Sarah, they featured her in areview post. And she said, It's
good, it's got to be good. Andthat's it, and I just got a
customer pre using organiccontent. So it's very important
(07:11):
to, you know, is this a strategyinvolved, I mean, obviously, you
have to look and see, you know,which reviews you want, you
know, you kind of pick a star orone star review and feature
that. So, you know, you got touse your head a little bit, and
you got to see which reviews areworth showcasing. And if people
made great content, you know, onon their phone, like if someone
(07:35):
had, if your restaurant, orlet's just use a product, for
example, if you if somebody madea Tiktok and featured and tagged
you, and said, Hey, I boughtthis product from your
convenience store, and it worksgreat. They're gonna mention,
you know, and as I was in there,I wouldn't have known about it,
(08:00):
if it wasn't for Bob, who hadgreat customer service, blah,
blah, blah, doesn't matter. Ifthey tagged the product that
you're selling, you don't careabout that you care about
tagging your store, and theexperience that that customer
had in your store, repost it andreshare it, make a comment on
it, make a comment on that post.
(08:21):
So people know that you respondalso onto that user generated,
it's not just about using usergenerated content, it's also
about proceed, you know, youreceiving 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
(08:44):
a rock star, and he posts thatyou're gonna be like, oh, man,
he posted the selfie with me.
You know, that's like a featthat's like, also almost like
feedback, like, oh, he likes theselfie. You know, see
equivalent, you'd be surprisedyou make a comment on someone's
page. And they're a celebrity.
And they comment back. Yeah,I'll make your day. Just, you
(09:04):
know, that's customers, too.
They're going to be like, Oh,look, the the convenience store,
they liked my comment. Soapparently, they care about what
people have to say about theirbrand. 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
(09:27):
resources on making content.
Doesn't have to be a graphic ifyou're not good at making
graphics. It could be just apost. It could be, you know, a
picture of that customer. Or itcould be a picture. It could be
their content. You take ascreenshot with your phone.
Doesn't matter what the qualitylooks like, no one cares. Take a
(09:49):
picture, do a screenshot. repostit and say, Hey, thanks,
Lorraine. This is great. Youknow, we love you guys. We love
our customers and tag themThat's it, that's a piece of
content. And if you really wantto go into more details on how
to create content,you know, there's if you go on
canva.com, I mean, they havemillions of templates, like, and
(10:12):
now with all this AI, you couldjust type what you want, you can
literally type into there, theyjust released it today,
actually, not today. But thisweek, it's like a magic AI tool,
you could type in there, youknow, and it's powered by like
chat GBT and all that stuff. Youcould type in there, review,
(10:33):
post, and whack enter, we couldeven put the wording you could
put review, post and paste inall the wording and whack the
enter key, and it'll make adesign for you. I mean, come on,
it's like right there. So justget that content, get it up, get
it out there, and then see whatyour audience you know, responds
with, and just add, you know,30, hashtags, or whatever and,
(10:56):
and call it a day. I mean,that's content creation. That's
literally, like, if you have 100reviews on Google, or, I mean, a
lot of restaurants that havebeen open for a long time,
they've 1000s of reviews. Andthat's just on Google, that's
1000 pieces of content. I mean,and, you know, you don't want to
(11:16):
like, you don't want to drownyour feed into user generated
content. But why don't you makeit a point to put on your
calendar, once a week, twice aweek, or three times a week, you
put out user generated content,that's free content, you know,
the word, you don't have to comeup with an idea that day, you
have it right in front of you.
(11:39):
So you know, stuff like that. Ithelps you to grow your brand,
grow trust, because now peoplewill trust you more. If you
know, if you have no fear, youknow, in putting out user
generated content, people trustyou more. If you need any help
(12:01):
with creating a contentcalendar, for your brand, I'm
going to leave a link in thedescription of this podcast
episode, I wrote an article. AndI'll actually show you how to
like, go to Canva, how to clickon designs and all that stuff.
It'll really help you in thelong run, because no one has
(12:22):
time, throughout the day throughto, you know, to open up their
phone, make a post, you mightnot have that time. So you make
this on the time that you dohave, and you could schedule
things in advance, you use aplatform like later.com, I mean,
you're talking about for liketheir starter plan, I think it's
(12:43):
now 15 or 20 bucks a month. Andyou can schedule posts, I mean,
you know, you can't really askfor a better time to want to do
all this. There's just so manyplatforms out there that are
helping business owners andcontent creators do all this. So
as a business owner, who doesn'thave time as it is to do
(13:04):
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 youhave consistent content out
there. That's really it when itcomes to user generated content.
This isn't really a huge topicto really break down because you
(13:27):
probably already know what usergenerated content is. After you
just, you know, glance over yourreviews, like I said, anything
that your customers are puttingout about you. You can use. And
it doesn't have to be textual.
Also, it could be a video, itcould be someone who did a tick
tock or an image just an imageof, you know, a food that they
(13:51):
ate, stuff like that, you know,is a perfect examples. So a new
a new feature that I added tothe blog is you can bookmark and
comment on posts. So I actuallywrote an article on this. So
that if you if you want to justif you want something to
(14:16):
reference, I'm going to put thatlink also in the description.
And you could you know, leave areply, make an account on the
website on the blog. Andbookmark this so that you can
reference it later. And if youwant to listen to it in the car,
you can even bookmark thepodcast episodes on the website
as well. I made a feature onthere so that any videos any
(14:39):
anything that's on the websiteis bookmark Abul. So that's
videos, blog posts, obviously,and audio like the podcast. So
this will be on there. And letme know what you think.
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