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Since it was founded in 2005, User Generated Content on YouTube has been at the heart of the platform’s success, a dynamic and diverse collection of videos created by its user community. The combination of high volume and creativity makes it a valuable tool in collecting content for your brand, and this blog post will demonstrate the ways you can harness the full potential of User Generated Content from YouTube.
Before outlining the strengths of UGC from YouTube it’s important to discuss the differences between photo UGC and video UGC, and which is more suitable depending on the type of content you want to collect.
Photos can capture a specific moment or emotion in a single frame, making it easy for customers to consume a high volume of content in a short time frame. As well as this it’s easier to create photo content than video, making it more accessible for a broader range of users, thus generating a higher volume of content. Therefore if your brand offers a wide variety and range of products, pulling content from platforms like Instagram is more useful.
So how do user generated video content differ? Whilst photos are great for highlighting specific moments, videos excel in storytelling, making them much more engaging and immersive. At times, photos can be misleading as they can be heavily edited with filters, via applications like FaceApp and software such as Photoshop, whereas videos can showcase your product in a more authentic way.
This also makes them much more effective at creating trust in potential customers, and in turn, they are much more likely to buy your product after watching a user generated video content from YouTube.
Given the effectiveness of UGC in showcasing your product and the relevancy of consumer generated marketing in today’s digital landscape, these videos should be made easily accessible to your customers. Therefore integrating user generated video content on your website is the perfect solution, and a tool such as Flowbox allows you to do this seamlessly.
Here is an example of one of the brands we work with, AndLight. They have a Flow of YouTube videos stylishly integrated into their website.
Not only do they have this gallery on their homepage of user generated video content, but each video has a link to all of the products featured, and vice versa, with relevant videos available in the information section of a product page as well. An integration like this makes the User Generated Content from YouTube on the website shoppable.
The main format of the videos that AndLight uses are room tours to demonstrate how to incorporate their products into homes, however, there are many different formats and types of User Generated Content on YouTube that are suitable for different products.
Popular premium cooking knife brand Global has added a dedicated video page to their website that features a Flowbox YouTube Flow. The page is packed with useful video tutorials given by professionals guiding users on the optimal use of their knives for various cooking-related tasks and providing insights on how to sharpen and care for them. This video content brings the product to life in a more dynamic way than static images can whilst simultaneously delivering the added value of communicating practical information to consumers and demonstrating the efficacy of the product.
What makes YouTube stand out, apart from being the largest video platform on the web, is how its algorithm ensures that both professionally produced and UGC videos can be featured on the recommended page and reach a wide audience. It doesn’t prioritise one over the other but instead uses different factors such as popularity and quality to determine what should be recommended. However, due to the increase in popularity of UGC in recent years, UGC videos often amass more views than professional content on YouTube.
Despite having a lower content volume than platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, one of the main advantages that YouTube has as a UGC platform is its longer video format. Instead of targeting a large audience that may not be relevant, User Generated Content on YouTube is tailored to a specific customer and target audience, as longer videos allow for a more in-depth engagement of your product, and therefore an increase in click-through rate.
Not working with a UGC platform yet? Book a demo to learn for yourself why brands all over the world trust Flowbox.
Before encouraging customers to create UGC for your product, it’s important to ensure your customer service and experience are at the highest standard. Customers who are loyal to your brand are much more likely to create UGC, but in order to build loyalty, effort has to be made on the company’s side first. As well as this, you want to ensure that the content created by customers will shed your product in a positive light rather than a negative one.
A way to give your customers an incentive to share their experience is by handing out discount codes or free gifts. Another way is to run a competition, where the winner is the customer who creates the most popular or creative UGC, for example. When running campaigns it’s useful to create a hashtag or keyword that customers can use to tag their video, this makes content collection quicker and easier.
To make sure your customers know that you are not only seeing but appreciating the content they’re creating, it’s important to engage with their videos. This can be as simple as leaving a comment and like on their post, or reposting their content on your social media pages. However, embedding UGC videos on your website can really make you stand out from competitors when it comes to customer experience and satisfaction. If customers see their content in a professional setting such as your website it lets them know that you truly value their content, which in turn motivates them to create more.
According to Wall St. Daily, from 2010 to 2011, GoPro managed to more than double its net income to 28 million dollars whilst only increasing its marketing budget by 50,000 dollars.
The secret?
Putting customer experience at the forefront of its marketing strategy, creating a cycle of utilising User Generated Content from YouTube and incentivising the creation of it.
Despite the risk of handing over control to your customers and audience, when UGC marketing is done right it not only promotes products but also creates a passionate community around the brand. Users feel connected and inspired by seeing what others can achieve with GoPro cameras, creating a positive feedback loop for the brand’s marketing efforts.
In 2015, GoPro took this a step further and created its own program, the GoPro Awards, where it rewards up to 5 million dollars a year to talented UGC creators who submit their raw and unedited footage on their social media. Since then new competitions have formed such as the million-dollar challenge and GoPro even hosts an award show each year inviting its top creators and winners.
You can collect videos that mention your brand or product in the title of their video or keywords in the description. Therefore it’s important that if you are encouraging customers to create UGC that you remind them to include your brand or product in the title or description of their video.
Yes, it is important to always ask for permission before sharing and using customer content, but having to ask each individual customer can be very time-consuming. However, with Flowbox, you can send rights requests seeking User Generated Content permission if you collect via mention, or a manual request via a keyword or hashtag. We’ve set up our rights request system to enable you to seek content permissions on a broad scale and efficiently oversee the entire process.
User Generated Content moderation is really important. With Flowbox, you can easily approve or reject content before it gets shared onto your website as well as have the option to pre-approve content.
