The Importance of User Generated Content

User generated content is a growing trend that is currently undervalued in many industries and it’s always interesting to see what large brands are making the most of UGC and how.

User generated content can be absolutely free, and equally as effective in promoting your brand, identifying or creating brand ambassadors as well as a helpful tool for listening in the spaces where your customers currently reside.

Paid media can be effective when done right, but UGC seems like a unique opportunity to reach customers in a different way without having to do anything. If you’ve got a great company, people of all ages, especially millennials, will share and create content about you that can come across as much more genuine than your expensive online advertisements can.

It’s important to leverage this content any way you can. How do you track and promote user generated content that’s relevant to your company? 

Is Your Company As Social As They Should Be?

                          

 All brands know the importance of marketing and advertising, which is why they pour MILLIONS upon MILLIONS into their advertisements, strategies, and methods needed to analyze the effectiveness. What they don’t seem to quite grasp yet is the importance of not only incorporating social media into their plans, but that they need to be paying more attention to it.

In a recent Advertising Age article, it discussed the fact that brands FACEBOOKS alone drive more activity and engagement than the website they had previously created. It’s not only driving more page views, but Facebook likes, comments, and more click-throughs to the articles, blogs and photos posted on those websites.

Marketing and advertising strategies need to be able to shift as quickly as possible, especially when all of their consumers are embracing social media via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more. Just because these sites don’t offer the types of analytics a company may be searching for, it is much more worthy of the time and money flowing through these departments to get in the social media game even if they can’t measure it as effectively as some other engagements.

Consumers of all sorts are on social media… that’s a fact. Most likely, they are the consumers that you’ve been targeting all along. Most consumers seem to be more heavily influenced by peers and followers on Facebook and Twitter when asking an opinion about a product, which is why it should concern companies who aren’t effectively monitoring the answers. 

Why not invest as much time and money into a medium where you’re consumers already exist, and see what possibilities could arise?  

Most people struggle with life balance simply because they haven't paid the price to decide what is really important to them --Stephen Covey

Today I read an interesting Adage article (http://ow.ly/1DhBs) declaring the importance of brands evolving and that our future is in new century brands. This was quite an interesting, but in my opinion correct, statement made by Adage writers.

This world, and the Internet itself is always changing, sites pop out, trends fade in and out and people move on to big and better ideas. The article talked about how consumers now want two-way interactions between companies and themselves, and they are not willing to be loyal to brands unless there is communication, interaction and loyalty between the brand itself.

People want (or they will soon) brands to focus on being green, eco-friendly, talkative, and they want them to apologize if something ever goes wrong. They want honesty, trust and to feel more when they buy something. I think we feel better if we're buying goods that are helping the planet, helping others, or at least have a message that we agree with.

Companies need to step up their game and harness social media, track what people say about their brand, and truly engage with customers if they want the customers loyalty. I'm excited to see where these new brands will take us.