With the rise in the importance of social media marketing and SMO, content marketing has been the hot topic of conversation amongst digital marketers for some time now. However, creating unique content on a regular basis can be time-consuming as well as really expensive (if you’re outsourcing), restricting the budget for all other business promotion activities.
Here’s where user-generated content (UGC) comes in to save the day! It is one of the most affordable and engaging ways for brands to produce content without having to rob the nearest bank. According to a study conducted by Millennials, over half the Americans trusted user-generated content way more than the content offered by the brand itself on its website. UGC is becoming a common practice today and is no longer only restricted to small-sized businesses on a budget.
User Generated Content 101
User-generated content refers to the information related to the brand published by the consumers instead of that framed by the brand itself or by contributors paid for it. The information can be in the form of photos, videos, forum posts, product reviews, guest posts or posts made on the brand\’s social profiles. Here\’s an interesting infographic on UGC by Ipsos MediaCT:
6 Benefits Of Using User Generated Content
Still having second thoughts about using the user-generated content in your strategy? Here are a few reasons that will convince you a 100% into optimizing it:
1. Understand Your Audience Better
When you use the content posted by your user, it not only helps you with the content strategy, but also lets them raise their opinions – good or bad, regarding your products. UGC makes understanding what your customers love (or hate) the most about your products and services, easy; which gives you the chance to better them.
Note: Make understanding your audience your primary goal.
2. Positive Customer Experience
Once they know you\’re paying heed to their conversations and trying to cater to all their needs, the customer experience you offer automatically becomes better.
Note: If there are far too many complaints from your customers, try and resolve each individually (not commonly) and DO NOT ignore them. Build a stronger community!
3. Your Posts Reach Knows No Boundaries
People love UGC!
Internet users love browsing through content on what people have got to say regarding a brand that interests them. UGC is as good as customer reviews and the freedom to post these reviews in any form (text, images, audio, video or any other multimedia ) makes it all the more fun for the customers. Almost everything we come across on social media is UGC.
Note: The stronger the bond you establish, the stronger is the probability of them promoting your products in their circles (and better the reach of your posts).
4. Trustworthy Content
A lot many people out there (like me), consult existing users of products/services of a brand, before investing in them. UGC serves as real-time content that people trust more than the content offered by brands on their websites, which is usually tagged as fabricated by audiences the world over.
Note: If you encourage UGC, chances are that your potential customers will trust your product’s services more; automatically increasing your sales.
5. Social Media Optimization
Tired of working towards optimizing on social platforms? UGC helps up your social presence with the help of your community. The community helps you create a lot of content around the keywords you\’re focussing on without having to spend hours doing so yourself.
Note: The hashtags your customers use while posting content related to your brand, aren’t always useless!
6. Affordable And Profitable
And should not be left unused. Brands set aside their marketing funds for different campaigns and focussing primarily on content marketing is just not possible. Hiring in-house or freelance writers isn’t always an option for brands (small or big). UGC is an effective alternative for the same.
Note: You not just get great content, but establish better bonds with your audience and become more socially present. Profitable from all angles.
How Do You Implement User Generated Content?
Too busy with other promotion activities to come up with ideas to use UGC? Here are some ideas we think are awesome:
1. Customized Cover Pictures
We are always about how you should keep updating your social profiles, be it Facebook or Twitter, and since you can’t really do much about the about for your brand, here is something that you can frequently change – cover picture. All thanks to UGC!
Starbucks has been making use of this one for some time now. They change their Facebook cover picture on a weekly (or monthly) basis to feature images that have been Instagrammed by their customers using the hashtag #starbucks.
Starbucks – Customized cover picture on Facebook
Psst.. our Cover Photo Live App lets you pull in images from Instagram and create customized cover pictures for your social profiles. Give it a shot!
2. Run Contests
Who doesn’t like winning? Run contests that encourage your audience to post their content related to a new product of your brand on your social profile along with a custom hashtag and share them in their circles. Give away small prizes (it could merely be a feature on your cover picture) to the one who is able to draw a maximum number of likes. (Smart promotion happening here!)
3. Acknowledge Consumers
It\’s always a good idea to encourage your audience to keep contributing content and to do that, you need to acknowledge them! Incorporate a ‘featured contributor’ of the month post in the content strategy of the week, that tags the person who has been posting about your brand the most.
Starbucks leverages from this one too!’
Shout-outs by Starbucks
Many brands are already leveraging from user-generated content. It’s either taking over your audience’s hearts or giving your competitors the chance to do the same. Choose wisely and get going!
About: Keyhole is a real-time social conversation tracker for some of the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Usage: This tool can be used by marketers to create effective content marketing strategies as it lets them focus on relevant keywords as well as stories trending in their audience’s circles to keep up with their interests.
Highlight: Keyhole offers a feature that gives you insights on what your brand’s target audience is talking about, what you need to talk about on your social profiles and which keyword is the most effective at that time.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves brands partnering with the top bloggers (read: social media influencers) in their fields to create more engaging and authentic content. This content is then shared in the influencer’s circles, promoting the brand\’s products and services without seeming too focussed on sales.
In simpler words, it’s promotion through word of mouth.
Influencer marketing has become one of the most powerful tools to get a brand’s message to the relevant audience in an authentic manner. Be it the promotion of a new product or an event to raise brand awareness, it’s a tried and tested way of driving in maximum engagement (from quality traffic).
Today, you see many brands like even Disney and LEGO successfully incorporating blogger promotions in their marketing strategies. And well, they have been doing it for a reason. That being, content. With content marketing on the rise, brands might run of ideas to create posts but these bloggers (read: influencers) are always going to come up with content that’s not just real, but authentic and unique.
What is Keyhole?
Keyhole is a real-time social conversation tracker for some of the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For marketers, these are those platforms that are the hardest to keep track of trending topics on.
The tool lets you not just track the hashtags that are trending in your industry, but also helps you identify influencers who can promote your brand in relevant circles. Keyhole is a successful social media tool being used by the likes of Ogilvy, Uniqlo, and TC Transcontinental.
Key Features of Keyhole
Keyhole has some unique features to offer to its users, here’s a list of them and how to use them effectively:
1. Hashtag Tracking
Every hashtag you see your audience using during conversations has a life span and it isn’t too long. The trending hashtags change from time to time and it becomes hard to keep a tab on them. What you can expect from this hashtag tracker:
User-friendly interface where you choose what you’re searching and which platforms you want to focus on
Your data is presented in graphs that are easy to interpret
The interactive dashboard allows you to pick which posts are more relevant to you
To give this tool a shot, we chose the keyword “content marketing” for the social platform, “Twitter” and this is what our dashboard look like:
The dashboard also includes a list of the most influential Twitter users talking about the keyword you specify and a list of the brands that are in competition with yours.
If you scroll down further, the dashboard gives you statistics on where your maximum traction is from – the location and the gender of the audience that is interested in the keyword you’re focusing on.
The dashboard also includes topics related to your keyword that are currently trending in your circles and where the content is being sourced from. This allows you to touch upon a range of topics that lets you cater to the different interests of your audience.
2. Influencer Marketing
This feature eradicates the process of finding and then pursuing influencers who could promote your brand in relevant circles by using real time data to give you information on:
People receiving high engagement on specific topics.
People with high affinity towards your competitors.
People leading the conversations at the top notch industry events.
All the above is accomplished by this three step process:
Topical Search. Enter the topics, company names or hashtags relevant to your brand that influencers could be talking about.
Filter and Sort. The tool gives you statistical data on the trending topics, their reach, engagement, influencers and their bio. The interactive dashboard lets you pick which data is more relevant to you so that you can filter and sort accordingly.
Drilling Down. The dashboard gives you a vast arena full of conversations to explore. Start reading up the conversations that have led to maximum engagement and see which one your brand could contribute to.
3. Newsroom Intelligence
This feature can let you focus on more than just the keyword you choose, it primarily gives you an idea of what to talk about in which circles.
91% of your target audience engages in conversations apart from those related to you. This feature gives you an insight into what’s trending in your audience’s circles so that you can offer content on diversified topics and draw in more engagement on your fan pages.
Whether you are into media or are a publishing house, Keyhole offers you a dashboard full of stories that your readers are engaging with in real-time, so that you don’t lose out on your audience’s interest.
Alternatives
If this tool doesn’t suit your needs, you can use Social listening tool for identifying influencers and also to create an effective content strategy.
About: Formerly known as Statigram, Iconosquare is a popular social media tool to help marketers analyse their Instagram accounts to create more effective marketing strategies.
Usage: Iconosquare is widely used as an Instagram viewer and for social analytics.
Highlight: The company has some really nifty tools for creating contests and making brand community management easy.
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A little while back, we shared with you the news how Instagram’s growth over the last few months has been more than phenomenal. The platform hit 200 million active users and the infographic we created gives you the statistics you need to know.
Well, considering that marketers don\’t really miss out on a chance to promote their brands on various platforms and that most of you reading this are already making the most out of Instagram, here’s a tool to help you analyze the success (or failure) of your strategy and make it better – Iconosquare.
What is Iconosquare?
Formerly known as Statigram, Iconosquare has gone through a massive rebranding process in the past and now, is in the news for its over 8 million users. It is one of the best social media tools that provide users with a better insight into their Instagram accounts.
“Anyone who uses Instagram should be on Iconosquare. Whether you’re an aspiring photographer who wants to see which pictures resonate best with your followings, or business of any kind looking to monitor social photo campaigns and initiatives”, says Mark Holder, Director, Partner Integrations at HootSuite Media Inc.
With a clientele like Coca Cola, Esprit, Samsung, Cathay Pacific and many more, this tool is a clear cut hit. Here are some good to know statistics about the company:
Key Features Of Iconosquare
1. Snapshots
The moment you login to Iconosquare, the team sends you an email to introduce one of its sweetest features – Snapshots. From the first time you posted on Instagram to your favourite Instagram accounts that you have high engagement activity with, Snapshots provide you with quick data about your account.
Instagram Summary Most Liked Media
Favorite Instagramers
2. Instagram Viewer
You can use this feature to view your news feed, like photos and videos of other users, post comments, follow/ unfollow people and everything that you can do otherwise while using Instagram conventionally.
3. Hashtag Search
Looking for images/ videos around your brand but don\’t know how to look for them? This feature offers a search function wherein you can look for particular users or hashtags relevant to your brand to analyze the audience interested in your brand. We tried looking for social media tips and here’s what we got:
4. Instagram Feed Plug-in
The Instagram feed plug-in can be easily installed on either your Facebook profile or your Facebook page, which makes sharing your Instagram posts with your community easy. This plug-in can also be used to integrate platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr etc with your Instagram account.
This is a great plug-in to promote your account on various social profiles and keep your audience engaged.
Install The Instagram Feed Tab For Facebook
5. Engage Audience Through Photo/Video Contests
Iconosquare offers a range of tools to help you enhance brand awareness by creating frequent photo/ video contests. There are a range of tools offered to help you set up, promote, moderate, monitor and publish results of an Instagram contest all within the Iconosquare dashboard.
Here\’s what Iconosquare recommends following for a successful campaign:
Set up your contest Engage your communities Moderation Public page on Iconosquare Promote your contest Monitor activity Announce Winners
And if ever you run out of ideas, you can browse through the existing contests that your competitors are executing.
6. Manage Conversations
This feature can be used to track conversations around your brand and in your audience\’s circles, send private messages (like on Twitter) to users in case the need arises. It is a great way to manage conversations, up the interaction with your followers and never miss out on their interests.
7. Analytics
Iconosquare offers core analytics and statistics that help you build a better Instagram marketing strategy for your brand. The analytics offered are – last 7 days, rolling month analysis, content, engagement, optimization and community. Here\’s a look at each of them:
Rolling Month Analysis
Rolling month analysis Engagement Optimization Community
A Tool For Community Managers
Analyzing all the features and concluding that the tool is pretty nifty, here are 5 reasons why we think community managers must absolutely use this tool:
Snapshot Readiness: Whether you want to share some fun facts or show off your popularity on Instagram to your communities on other social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc, the tool offers you ready images strictly based on your Instagram statistics.
GreatOptimization: The Optimization feature offered by Iconosquare guides you to meeting your follower\’s interests with recommendations on the best time to post and the impact of the filters and tags you use on your posts.
Easy Promotion: The easy installation of the Instagram feed tab on your Facebook page creates a link between the two platforms you\’re present on and makes all your Instagram posts discoverable by your Facebook community.
Interesting Add-ons: Other features offered by this tool include a cover picture generator that uses up to 50 latest pictures from your account to create an interesting cover, a gallery widget and follow buttons to integrate your account to your blog/ website.
Create Contests: Iconosquare offers a plethora of tools to help you set up, promote, monitor and analyze your contest campaigns. It also lets you take a look at the campaigns that your competitors are running, which not just gives you an idea on where you stand but also ideas to better your strategies.
If you haven’t given Iconosquare a shot, we suggest you do asap! You can also sign up for a free social listening trial
About: 12mass is a social media tool that uses Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) search engine and advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and clustering tools to assimilate similar status updates around a business.
Usage: The tool can be used to track conversations on the two biggest social platforms – Twitter and Facebook. It also offers response suggestions based on real-time analytics on the same to help you measure engagement levels on your social profiles.
Highlight: The A/B testing feature of this tool provides solid numbers after analyzing your social profiles, which is essential for analysis and optimization making it one of the most effective A/ B testing social media tools.
Focus On Customer Relationships
Businesses, big or small, often make the mistake of only offering their services to their audience instead of trying to build long-term relations with them. We have time and again emphasized on the fact that if you don\’t reach out to your customers, you’re not only going to lose your existing list but also a lot of prospects.
Hana goes on to share, According to Lithium studies, customers have high expectations for a quick response: 53 percent who expect a brand to respond to their Tweet demand that response comes in less than an hour, according to the Lithium-commissioned study by Millward Brown Digital. That figure skyrockets to 72 percent when they have complaints.
When companies don’t meet these lofty response expectations, 38 percent feel more negative about the brand and a full 60 percent will take unpleasant actions to express their dissatisfaction.
Are You Losing Customers?
Spend some time coming up with a few reasons why your customers may have left you. Here are some that we hear of the most:
They had complaints that remained unresolved.
They felt their suggestions were not being taken into consideration.
And the one that is taking you down..
They felt you did not care about them.
How do you ensure this doesn’t happen? Start talking to them! And here’s where 12mass comes in.
What Does 12mass Do?
Brands that join the conversations and respond are relying on a large army of community managers and cross-platform social dashboards like HootSuite, Sprout Social and TweetDeck among others. However, these platforms only allow one-on-one interaction, which is simply not scalable. There is no way a brand can catch up with the influx of mentions this way, says Hana.
Key Features Of 12mass
Brands can now group similar mentions and status updates and attend to them more efficiently with prepared responses of that specific group. Over time, engagement of each response is tracked and brands are able to know which one of them has higher CTR, mention-back rate, or retweets rate, says Hana.
1. Ongoing A/ B Testing
This one is for those who love using analytics and A/ B testing to gauge the success of their social media strategies. This feature uses the same A/ B testing process used while optimizing websites, running email campaigns, and advertising letting you:
Measure the engagement on your social profiles from time to time.
Gain more satisfied customers.
Increase engagement by tracking conversations around you.
2. Suggested Responses
This feature lets you save your response to tweets/ posts as a draft and based on what responses you have sent out in the past, and their click through rates, it suggests the most engaging responses for the new interactive tweets/posts.
The feature lets you avoid having to use automation, be efficient and add a personal touch to your responses; making your fan page more relatable.
3. Dialog Decision Tree
This feature lets you build a dynamic decision tree based on the past conversations you\’ve had with your audience on your social profiles, using Natural Language Processing (NLP), clustering tools, and engagement tracking.
This is the best to optimize conversations with customers.
4. Smarter Search
This feature not only lets you search for keywords around your business but also people, mentions, Facebook comments, and posts that are related to you. These can be filtered as per your preference of analyzing and tracking engagement – location, language, number of followers, images influential score, etc.
This search parameter takes into consideration real-time activity so that you don’t miss out on any conversation.
5. Track Your Progress
This feature offers an easy-to-understand dashboard full of statistics that let you track the engagement level and click-through rates on each of the tweets/ posts on your social profiles. This data is can be saved for later use to help you create a better strategy.
Why Should Marketers Use 12mass?
If the features haven’t convinced you, here’s why Hana thinks you should give 12mass a chance; Long gone is the battle for the number of likes and followers on social media accounts. Engagement is far more valuable than those numbers as it’s tied closely to ROI. Customers who are engaged on social media are more loyal to your brand and more likely to have it top-of-mind as compared to your less active counterpart. 12mass is a powerful tool to scale up conversations when you as one community manager can reach hundreds of people every day. What’s better? You can be sure that your responses are working! It is estimated to save you at least 2 hours every day responding to tweets.
About: Adsy.me is the first mobile web application that enables everyone to create and share mobile web applications from their smartphones. These applications are distributed as short URLs are are easy to share via text messages, email or on social networks. It is optimized for iOS 6+ and Android 4.1+ .
Usage: This tool can be used by the marketers to create quick and interesting apps around their products and services to engage their audience better. For example, letting them create a customized product from the range you already offer.
Highlight: The tool has a user friendly interface and is easy to grasp on to thanks to the number of tutorials posted by the company. And, it is free!
Increasing Audience Engagement
If you haven’t been keeping a tab on all the digital marketing news, customer service and satisfaction aren\’t the only thing that determine your success; customer engagement plays a very big role in taking up or bringing down a business. All the marketing techniques, right from content marketing to placing ads on every social platform available out there, it’s all about capturing the audience’s attention. Marketers are forever looking for ideas that will help them stand out from their competitors and engage their audience better. Here’s where Adsy comes in.
What is Adsy?
Frédérick Tubiermont, the Co-founder and CEO of Adsy that the aim of the tool is to allow their audiences at create simple yet visually appealing appealing apps for various purposes, be it for personal or business use.
Tubiermont went on to explain, We also thought that it was kind of sad that there wasn’t any true self-expression medium for youngsters anymore on the WWW (remember Geocities?) adapted to a mobile-centric audience, with good taste (no blinking marquees)”. Despite being in its Beta stages, the tool is already a huge hit amongst all age groups because of its easy to use interface. Our youngest beta testers have already created apps about their friends, their school, their passions, their holidays”, says Tubiermont.
Curious? Here’s a short video about Adsy, created by Sweet Crude that you MUST watch!
How Do You Use Adsy?
In the era where customer engagement has become synonymous with content marketing, we feel Adsy is pretty promising. Since it requires very little effort and offers most of its’ features for free, it is a great way for small-sized businesses to engage their audiences.
App Interface: Adsy allows you to add in any form of media – photos, videos from YouTube and even music from SoundCloud!
With Adsy.me you can share your passion for cupcakes, create & share BBQ & birthday invitations or promote your business, the use cases range from the most casual to the uber professional. We give you a blank canvas, no preset templates, to fully express your creativity inside the squares of the Adsy pages,\” shares Tubiermont.
Here’s a quick tutorial to help you get started with Adsy:
What Can You Use Adsy For?
Adsy can be used in so many ways to create an interesting content marketing strategy. Here are a few ways we came up with:
Storytelling: Use the animations that you can create on Adsy to depict your business story. But before you get down to filming it, have one in place. It could be your business’s rise to success or a great customer experience that you want to share with your prospects. Mix photos, text, stickers, sounds and create one amazing video!
Promoting: Got a new product/ service to launch or an upcoming event that matters a lot to your business? Create a video that triggers the curiousness in your audience. The idea is to not try and sell your products ‘directly’ right?
Polling: Want to know what your customers think of your products/ services? Create a poll around the same and instead of the conventional voting, ask them to vote for the characters you make to represent our products/ services. This is a great way of engaging your audience for feedback purposes as it gives you a general idea about their likes and dislikes.
Inviting: What’s better than asking your audience to interact with you? Create a short clip on how important customer engagement is for you and, how and in what ways you are looking forward to talking to them.
Future Plans For Adsy
There is more to Adsy.me than just content creation. Expect these additions to the app in the following year:
A development of a full fledged social network around Adsy apps are underway such as following users and engaging with other apps by liking and sharing.
Gamification features are going to be included soon! (hint: Creative contests)
Public and private messaging will be introduced in second quarter of 2014 enabling any Adsy app maker to connect with their followers, in one-to-one instant chat or broadcast mode.
A broadcast mode will enable someone with 1,000 followers to message all of them in a single broadcast at least once a month for free!
So has this enticed you use to use Adsy yet? Share with us the ways you are using (or planning to) it to interact with your audience!
Instagram Summary 
Most Liked Media 
Install The Instagram Feed Tab For Facebook
Set up your contest 
Engage your communities 
Moderation 
Public page on Iconosquare 
Promote your contest 
Monitor activity 
Announce Winners
Engagement 
Optimization 
Community
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