Content from clients.

What user-generated content is

Crowdsourcing applied to content means involving your audience in creating it. Instead of producing everything inside the company, you use the ideas, knowledge and material of the people around the product: customers, partners, outside specialists.

It takes different forms. A review with a photo, an unboxing, a story of use, an answer to a question in the community, an idea for a new flavour or colourway submitted to a contest - all of this is content created not by you, but working for you.

The difference from ordinary production is fundamental: such material is perceived as testimony, not as advertising. A person trusts another buyer's photo more than a studio shoot, because the author has no reason to embellish.

Let us look at what this gives a business, how to launch collection, which mistakes kill it and how to build the result into your work.

What it gives a business

Volume. A small company cannot publish material every day with a single marketer. The audience can, and in total produces more than any in-house team.

Variety. People show the product in situations that would never have occurred to you. This broadens your understanding of why people buy from you - and often opens up new scenarios for promotion.

Savings. Material created by the audience costs less than production. Not free - moderation takes time and participants need motivation - but noticeably cheaper.

Engagement. A person whose material has been published becomes closer to the brand. They are no longer just a buyer but a participant, and behave accordingly.

Trust. This is the main one. Reviews and stories from real people work on the purchase decision more strongly than any description from the company. How reviews influence reputation is covered in a separate article.

How to launch collection

The first step is to define exactly what you need. “We want more user-generated content” is not a task. A task sounds more specific: we need photos of the product in an interior, we need stories of using the service, we need answers to the question of what stopped people buying.

The second is to choose where to collect it. This could be a social media community, a form on the site, a separate reviews section, a hashtag. The main thing is that the path is short: the more steps, the fewer participants.

The third is to explain what you are asking for and why. People take part more willingly when they understand how their material will be used and what they will get in return.

The fourth is to provide motivation. It is not always monetary: a publication crediting the author, status in the community, early access to new products, a discount on the next order. The reward must be proportionate to the effort.

The fifth is to start small. One clear request to the audience tests the hypothesis better than a large-scale contest with pages of rules.

Formats that work

• Review with a photo. The simplest entry point: asking for a photo to be attached to a review multiplies its value.
• Stories of use. A customer tells what problem they solved with your help. Ready-made material for the portfolio section.
• Questions and answers. The audience asks questions, other customers answer. A side effect: you learn buyers' real objections.
• Idea contest. Suggestions for a new product, name or design. Works both as research and as an occasion for communication.
• Co-authorship. Joint material with a customer or a specialist in your niche: both sides have their own audience.
• Round-up of submissions. Regular publication of the best material from the audience - a simple ritual that keeps the flow going.

The choice of format depends on what the audience is willing to do. Asking for a video where people struggle to write two lines of a review is pointless. How to build this into your overall publishing plan is described in our article on content strategy.

What you must plan for

The approach has weak points, and it is better to cover them in advance.

Usage rights. By publishing someone else's photo, you are using someone else's material. The terms of participation must explicitly state that the author permits use in your channels, and for how long.

Moderation. Submissions need checking: for relevance to the topic, for quality, for the absence of third-party trademarks and other people's personal data. Without moderation the flow quickly fills up with things that cannot be published.

Negative material. Some submissions will be criticism. Deleting it wholesale is a bad strategy: the community notices. It is wiser to respond on the substance, and how to do that is covered in our article on dealing with negativity.

Unevenness. The flow of material is unstable: a spike after launch, then a slump. Planning publications on user-generated content alone is risky - it complements your own content rather than replacing it.

Feedback to participants. Material that was submitted and ignored kills motivation across the whole community. Everyone needs a reply, even if you do not publish everything.

How to tell what is working

It is worth assessing on three levels, not by the number of submissions.

The first is participation: how many people responded relative to the reach of the request. A low response usually means the request is unclear or the effort is too great for the reward offered.

The second is the impact on sales. A product page with user photos and one without convert differently, and this is easy to check by comparison. The procedure for checking is in our article on A/B testing.

The third is savings. Compare the cost of producing material yourself with the cost of collecting it: moderation time, prizes, community support. Sometimes it turns out that shooting it yourself is cheaper.

It is also useful to look separately at the side result: which product use scenarios you learned about and which objections you heard. This information often turns out to be more valuable than the material itself and comes in handy in working with the community - more about that in a separate article.

Where to start

If you have no user-generated content right now, start with the cheapest step: ask existing customers to attach a photo to their review and offer a small discount on the next order in return.

This launch requires no contest, no rulebook and no budget - just emails to your database and a place to send things to. The response will show whether the audience is willing to take part at all, and whether it is worth building anything more complex.

Then you can expand: add the stories format, start a regular feature with submissions, bring in the community. The order is exactly that - from simple to complex, with a check at every step.

Assembling this into a working system is part of the reputation and community work we do within reputation management and PR. And if you need material for a constant flow of publications, have a look at our guide to engaging content.