Why Brands Should Repost User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is defined as “any form of content such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, posts, chats, tweets, podcasting, pins, digital images, video, audio files, and other forms of media that was created by users of an online system or service, often made available via social media websites.”
UGC thrives on Instagram, especially proving effective for brands. For the brand, UGC makes its content less “mercantile-oriented” or less “sales-y”. By using UGC, the brand appears closers to its fans and engages more with its followers. For marketers, UGC is:
- Cost-effective – since money is not spent on producing nor promoting
- Increases Reach – the brand reaches a wider audience with more users creating their own content about the brand
- Trusted content – audiences believe the opinions of other customers over the content produced by the brand itself
The most effective and easiest way to encourage UGC is by implementing and monitoring an appropriate hashtag. Another strategy is to run contests and feature the best UGC on the brand’s platform via reposting. There are apps available specifically for reposting content on Instagram. These include Repost for Instagram, InstaRepost, Regram*, and more.
Today’s Business’ client, Pure Pita, is a restaurant franchise in the northern New Jersey area, offering Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine available for dine-in or delivery. Today’s Business began to repost user-generated content as part of the strategy for the restaurant’s Instagram account in 2015.
The photos are better quality and more appealing, as the user of the original post takes the time to edit, crop, etc. The users of the original posts also tend to use location tags, resulting in over 30 tagged posts under each Pure Pita location, which increases visibility for the brand.
In the first six months of this tactic’s implementation, Pure Pita saw an increase of about 300 followers. In the following six months, the accounts gained an additional almost 400 followers. Although the likes of the reposts have not seen a significant increase, the posts are receiving about 5x more comments.
*Note: Due to Instagram’s latest API update (how your data was accessed for the app) Regram is no longer a useful application. As of 06/01/2016, Regram is no longer functional and therefore has been removed from the app store.