Social Media Managers: Daily Challenges & Solutions with UGC Automation

Social Media Managers face unprecedented challenges in the evolving digital space. With increasing pressure to deliver authentic content at scale while driving measurable business results, traditional content creation approaches are falling short.

The complexity of managing multiple platforms, engaging diverse audiences, and maintaining a consistent brand voice has created a perfect storm of challenges that demands innovative solutions.

In this article, we’ll show how Flowbox UGC platform directly addresses these challenges, transforming them into opportunities for growth and engagement. We’ll detail specific solutions for content creation bottlenecks, resource optimisation, and authenticity concerns, providing actionable insights for Social Media Managers looking to improve their content strategy through user-generated content (UGC).

Social Media Managers’ Tasks and Challenges on a Daily Basis

Social Media Managers juggle a never-ending list of tasks, many of which are repetitive and time-consuming. With so much manual work, there’s little room for high-level strategy and creative brand-building. Their daily responsibilities often include:

1. Activating the Community: Encouraging followers to participate in discussions, share content, and interact with the brand to foster a loyal and engaged audience.
2. Building Engagement: Responding to comments, messages, and mentions to keep the conversation going and strengthen relationships with customers.
3. Leveraging UGC: Finding and utilizing user-generated content to enhance brand authenticity and showcase real customer experiences.
4. Sourcing Creators: Identifying brand advocates, influencers, and content creators who align with the brand’s values and aesthetics.
5. Requesting Content Rights: Ensuring legal permission to use UGC by reaching out to users and securing necessary rights for marketing purposes.
6. Downloading and Organizing Content: Saving high-quality UGC efficiently while maintaining a structured content library for easy access.
7. Repurposing Content for Multiple Formats: Adapting UGC for different platforms, such as transforming an Instagram post into an email campaign or a TikTok video into an ad.
8. Distributing Content Across Channels: Seamlessly publishing UGC on websites, social media, product pages, and ads to maximize reach and engagement.

Automating these tasks is crucial for Social Media Managers to work more efficiently and focus on what truly drives brand growth—strategy, creativity, and community building. Manual processes not only consume valuable time but also increase the risk of errors, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities.

By streamlining repetitive tasks like content sourcing, engagement tracking, and rights management, automation allows brands to scale their social media efforts without sacrificing quality. It also ensures that the right content reaches the right audience at the right time, maximizing engagement and ROI.

Let’s explore the major challenges facing Social Media Managers today and how the Flowbox UGC Platform offers innovative solutions to these pressing issues.

By examining each pain point, we’ll demonstrate how the right platform can transform these challenges into opportunities for enhanced engagement and brand growth.

1. Scale & Consistency Issues

Trying to maintain a consistent presence on all social media channels can be difficult for social media managers, but this can be resolved with a scheduling tool that enables you to publish your brand content and UGC.

Challenge: Multi-Platform Presence & Brand Consistency

Maintaining consistent brand presence across multiple platforms while adapting to each channel’s unique requirements creates significant operational challenges for a social media manager. This often results in content gaps or compromised quality.

The need to customise content for different platform specifications while maintaining brand consistency becomes increasingly complex as new platforms and features emerge.

Solution: Content Organisation and Distribution with Flowbox

Flowbox’s sophisticated Publish tool allows for easy organisation, tagging, and distribution of UGC and brand content across multiple channels. This ensures consistent brand presence while maintaining the authentic voice that audiences crave.

1. On the Navigation bar, click on the ‘Publish’ icon.

2. You will see a calendar displaying your scheduled posts, including those already created and published.

3. To create a new post, click on the ‘Create post’ button in the top-right corner.

The tool’s interface allows users to create, customise, schedule, and publish content directly to their social media accounts. Which greatly reduces the time spent by social media managers on planning and shooting content to post manually on a variety of platforms. It can all be done within the Flowbox platform.

2. Resource Constraints

A limited budget can seriously constrain the creativity of a social media manager, it can block new ideas. So why not let your customers do the work for you?

Challenge: Budget Limitations

Limited budgets and resources make it difficult to maintain consistent, high-quality content production. Professional photoshoots and content creation services strain social media-marketing budgets while delivering diminishing returns on engagement.

The cost of hiring photographers, videographers, and creative teams adds up quickly, especially when considering the volume of content needed for effective social media presence.

Solution: Content Cost Reduction with UGC

UGC eliminates the need for expensive professional shoots while providing authentic, high-quality content at scale. A great example of this is XXL Nutrition, a brand working with Flowbox who found that, with their widening product catalogue, they did not have the resources available to promote every item.

That is why they turned to UGC with Flowbox. This strategy was a success and led to XXL Nutrition having an 87.98% increase in Average Order Value.

The benefit of having a UGC strategy is clear to see. Why spend huge amounts on professional content for your products when you can turn your customers into artists with the correct strategy.3. Content Creation Overwhelm

3. Content Creation Overwhelm

The main challenges faced by Social Media Managers when it comes to content creation is that there is a constant change in what the user wants to see on a variety of different platforms that cater to different styles of content.

Challenge: The Growing Content Creation Burden

Social Media Managers struggle with the constant demand for fresh, engaging content across multiple platforms. Traditional content creation methods are time-consuming, expensive, and often fail to resonate with increasingly discerning audiences who crave authenticity.

Solution: Activating your community through UGC calls-to-action or announcements

Brands like Vera Wang Bride and IKEA make it easy for people to participate in their UGC initiatives by:

• Creating custom branded hashtags that represent their brand identity – Designing memorable, unique hashtags that align with your brand values and are easy for customers to remember and use

• Placing clear UGC announcements in social media bios across various social media platforms – Ensuring the call for content is visible and easily accessible across all platforms

The following images show you how they place these announcements on their social media profiles:

By creating meaningful opportunities for participation and celebrating community contributions, brands can foster a self-sustaining cycle of authentic content creation. Customers are much more likely to be interested in and influenced by other users’ content.

Recent surveys showed that 62% of people said using more user-generated content (UGC) was “highly important” as a way to improve brand authenticity.

Challenge: Multi-Format Content Demands

The pressure to produce content for various formats – from Stories to Reels, TikToks to standard posts – creates a never-ending cycle of creation that can quickly lead to burnout. Moreover, the rapid pace of social media trends means that content can become outdated almost as soon as it’s created, forcing teams to constantly chase the next big thing while trying to maintain quality and brand consistency.

Solution: Simple Social Media Integration with Flowbox

With Flowbox you can connect to all of your social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and more. This means that you can automatically collate all of your users’ content posted across the web when they use your branded hashtag.

To read more on which platforms we support and how to easily you can integrate Flowbox, check out this collection of articles.

The benefit of having one platform where you can connect all of your social media accounts to your customers’ user-generated content is simply that you can massively increase the amount of content that your brand has to use in its’ content strategies.

With Flowbox, The Guggenheim Bilbao collect an average of 1,235 user-generated images and videos each month.

Future-Ready Social Media Management

As social media continues to evolve, UGC becomes increasingly critical for brand success. Flowbox provides the tools and infrastructure needed to stay ahead of digital trends while maintaining authentic connections with audiences.

The platform’s continuous updates and feature additions ensure that social media managers can keep their brand competitive in the ever-evolving digital world.

By embracing UGC through Flowbox, brands position themselves to adapt quickly to new platforms and changing consumer preferences, ensuring long-term social media success. Book a demo today!