Content marketing got you down? Feeling tired from the stress of creating content? Well, fear no more because user-generated content is here to blast those problems away!
Sorry for the cheesy infomercial intro (not thaaat sorry). Mark was just wondering what it’d be like to be an infomercial scriptwriter. Turns out, not much fun.
But for real, user-generated content (UGC) is a great way to create great content without adding to your workload. If you’re not familiar with the concept, UGC is simply just using your audience to create content for you—any type of content, not just blog content! Coke and Starbucks do this all the time. In the marketing world, much of Moz’s blog is UGC.
Once you get your UGC campaign up and running, it’ll reduce your workload by giving you free, unique content. That type of content will improve your website’s SEO because your users are going to use more/different keywords in their content than you use. Google likes that variety. But wait, there’s more! UGC also helps build social proof.
Today’s Read also offers a few ideas on how you can create a UGC strategy:
- Start by reviewing your audience. What platforms are the most likely to use that you can leverage? For example, if your audience are avid Instagram users, then a photo-sharing campaign is a simple option.
- Set requirements for the content you want your users to provide. Moz has some good suggestions here.
- Create a landing page on your website to collect and promote UGC. This is going to be specific to each campaign, but it’s vital to do this.
- Engage with your audience. Connect with anyone who submits content. Promote discussions around UGC on social media. If you’re using UGC for blog content, definitely make sure you have comments enabled on your blog posts.
- Don’t forget to showcase top-performing content. Highlight the stuff that gets the most likes, shares, clicks, etc.
More to learn on this one…
