How to Collect User-generated Content (UGC) That Boosts Trust And Sales

You know customers love your business.

But your prospects don’t know.

Now, you need to collect user-generated content (UGC) to prove the love.

So that prospects who see your UGC will be compelled to try your product for its benefits.

How do you go about it?

In a moment, you’ll see creative ways to get your audience to deliver all the user-generated content you need.

Let’s get started.

9 ways to collect user-generated content

1. Use a branded hashtag

If you visit BMW’s Instagram profile, you’ll see this line in their bio:

“Use #BMWRepost for the chance to get featured.”

This line captures what I’m explaining here.

A branded hashtag is a hashtag that includes your brand name. Branded hashtags provide a few benefits for your business.

First, it can grow your brand awareness. Say a customer wears your t-shirt and uses your branded hashtag in her caption, her friends will see it.

Even more, they can click on that hashtag to see how other customers use your products. This is a lot of free and compelling publicity for your t-shirt brand.

Second, branded hashtags will give you user-generated content to feature on your social media accounts.

For example, if you want to emphasize a benefit of your product, you can feature a UGC that delivers this message.

And with 79% of people saying UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions, UGC is your best bet to sell more.

That said, how do you create a branded hashtag?

The simplest way is to combine your brand name with an action your product embodies. For instance, cameras shoot pictures.

Once you create this branded hashtag, you can put it in your Instagram bio to encourage customers to use it. An example is #shotononeplus, which shows images shot by the smartphone camera. The brand features the content on its feed and stories.

Here’s an Instagram UGC example by BMW:

You may think, “How will I collect the posts from these hashtags?”

There are tools for that, which I’ll list later in this guide. 

However, you need to take a few steps before sharing UGC on your page. 

For example, Instagram’s community guidelines state that you should ask for permission before using other users’ content.

You can ask for permission by commenting on the original post, sending a DM, sending an email, or sending a WhatsApp message.

Once you have their permission, you can use the UGC in your marketing campaigns.

Using a branded hashtag is the easiest strategy to collect more user-generated content.

2. Create contests and giveaways 

During Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving, consumers look out for deals and giveaways. But whatever time of the year, most people won’t say no to a gift.

When you run contests and giveaways, you give out a gift for marketing objectives like brand awareness, account growth, and lead generation.

But in this case, you’ll be running them to collect UGC. This will be a contest that requires participants to submit an image or video for a chance to win a prize.

Now, think about it.

You can give out a $300 gift and receive as many as 10 excellent UGC videos to use in your future campaigns. At $30 per video, I’d say that’s a good deal.

Even more, you can specify the type of UGC you want. This can be UGC that stresses a benefit, shows a feature, or creates awareness for a new product.

Apart from collecting UGC, this type of contest can easily go viral and boost your brand awareness.

For UGC contests, you can judge entries in two major ways:

• Let judges select the best entry
• Let people vote for the best entry

You can even create a UGC gallery where people can see all the entries.

To be safe, state in your contest terms that your business has the right to use entries in future marketing campaigns.

That said, you’ll need a contest tool to pull this off. The tool can help you host your UGC gallery, collect hashtag entries, and track other information about your contests.

You can see the list of the best social media giveaway tools for options.

Here’s a hashtag giveaway by Hatley:

The clothing brand specifies the hashtag, and the type of UGC participants should create. It also specifies that the brand can use entries on its social media accounts and other marketing platforms.

Contests and giveaways can help build a positive mood with your audience while collecting quality UGC. 

3. Collect through a QR code

Quick-response (QR) codes have become popular over the years. 

This is how a QR code works.

When your customers or prospects scan a QR code, it will lead them to a particular web page or provide other types of information.

From shopping to manufacturing to marketing, you’ll find many use cases for QR codes.

Here, I’ll dwell on its use cases in marketing, particularly collecting user-generated content.

One benefit of using QR codes is their ease. Since most people always have their smartphones nearby, it’s easy to scan the QR code online or offline to visit your collection page.

The QR code can be on your website, business card, product, product case, and offline store.

To make this effective, you have to create a landing page for collecting user-generated content.

You can even use social proof to your advantage by having the landing page double as a UGC gallery.

So, before a customer submits their content, they’ll see content from other customers. This can encourage them to submit theirs.

After designing your landing page, it’s important to place your QR codes where customers will see them. You should also use a CTA that directs customers to scan the code.

Here’s a QR widget by elfsight that lets customers rate a business on Google:

You can use elfsight or other QR code tools to create your QR codes.

QR codes work well to collect UGC offline and online. If you run an offline store, you can tell customers to scan the QR code on their product case to review the product.

4. Send UGC request emails

Have you ever received an email 2 weeks after buying a shirt asking to share your thoughts about it?

That’s a UGC request email in action.

UGC request emails are messages that encourage customers to share their experience with your product.

Usually, customers can receive these messages sometime after buying a product, when they have formed an opinion about it.

Remember, customers sometimes need a nudge to create UGC for your products.

And with this email, you can direct customers to your website review page or a preferred review site.

You may ask, “How do I send emails individually to the hundreds of people who buy my products?”

This is where marketing and email automation come in.

You can set up automated email sequences for customers. So, when a customer buys a product, your marketing automation tool automatically sends a review request email after a set time.

Remember to give people enough time after the purchase before requesting a review. This way, they can have proper experience to share.

However, there’s no set time for this, and it can depend on your product.

Here’s an example from Jumia:

The ecommerce brand sent this email after I bought a pressing iron. The brand positions the review request as helping it improve its service and helping customers understand the product. 

If I want to leave a review, the “Rate it” button makes it easy, and I can leave a review in minutes.

UGC request emails can help you rack up product reviews, which will attract more customers.

5. Use listening to uncover mentions

People mention brands in social media posts every day. You only need to scroll through a social media platform to see positive posts without tags or branded hashtags.

This may be because the customer doesn’t follow the brand on social media or forgot to tag.

Unfortunately, if your brand is mentioned this way, you’ll get no notification.

Because of this, you can miss out on a lot of organic user-generated content praising your product.

You can solve this problem by using a listening tool to track relevant brand, competitor, and industry keywords.

Apart from collecting and reposting UGC, a listening tool can deliver more actionable information about other aspects of your business.

Clean Origin is a company that sells lab-grown diamonds. In this Twitter post, they share a Business Insider article that praised lab-grown diamonds.

This works as UGC since the article writer is a wedding reporter and received a lab-grown diamond ring as her engagement ring.

Social media listening can provide many opportunities to collect UGC and other information about your brand.

6. Find influencer customers

While UGC is effective, combining it with an influencer’s reach will put a nitro behind your results.

Here, I’m not talking about the typical influencer marketing campaigns.

The thing is, even influencers regularly mention products they like without any reward attached.

Sometimes, this may be a product they use daily to get work done. Or it may be a work tool that’s not in their industry. For example, a beauty influencer praising a social media management tool.

This UGC will have a bigger reach as the influencer’s audience can also see it.

How do you find UGC from influencer customers?

One way is to watch out for your mentions.

But if the influencer didn’t tag your business, you can use listening tools to uncover the content. 

After finding the content, you can reach out to the influencer to repost.

Some influencers will allow you to repost for free, while others may request a little compensation.

Here’s a post by Alexander Boswell, a writer, on LinkedIn:

In this post, he mentioned a tool, ButterDocs, as a great asset to creating a content piece. Unsurprisingly, writers promised in the comments to try the tool.

ButterDocs can repost this content on their LinkedIn profile as it’s an organic testimonial.

Finding influencer customers is important, as you can’t underestimate the influence of an account’s popularity.

7. Create a UGC collection website page

A UGC collection page provides a form for customers to submit information about your product.

This page can collect content in two common formats:

• Testimonials 
• Reviews

Apart from collecting UGC, this page can convince prospects to try your products.

While posting UGC on social media is fine, you also need to have them on your website. Ultimately, you don’t own social media platforms nor control their reach.

Beyond that, people will visit your website before buying. So, it’s great to use social proof when prospects need it most.

To design this page, you can reach out to your web designer to discuss the information and content type to collect.

Here’s Goldstein Tax Prep’s review page:

The company has used one stone to kill two birds here. The review appears both on the website and Google Business.

So, the reviews can act as social proof on the website and help the business rank higher in local searches.

Apart from collecting testimonials and reviews, you can also have a website page that shows your social media UGC.

For example, GoPro features Instagram UGC on its challenge pages.

You can explore many options to feature UGC on your website pages.

8. Uncover UGC in brand tags

This is one of the most straightforward options.

Whenever a customer tags your brand in UGC content, social media platforms will notify to you.

Of course, if you have hundreds of thousands of followers, it can take some time to go through the notifications. 

But the possibility that you’ll find great UGC makes those notifications worthwhile.

Apart from the ease, I also like this option because people who tag your brand want you to see the content. 

So, they’ll be happy you want to feature their content on your social media account page.

Doing this can encourage other customers to create UGC in the future.

Here’s James Charles doing a review of a Jones Road Beauty foundation:

In the caption, he tags Jones Road Beauty. This means the brand will get a notification and can reach out to James to repost the content.

Even if you don’t want to spend a lot of time or effort on your UGC strategy, you can find some great content right in your notifications.

9. Hire a UGC creator

While UGC used to be totally free, you can now pay UGC creators for content pieces. 

As the name implies, UGC creators use your product and create content like a typical customer would. UGC creators are popular on TikTok and Instagram.

There are a few differences between hiring a UGC creator and an influencer. A UGC creator doesn’t necessarily need a big following and won’t cost as much as an influencer.

Hiring a UGC creator can become necessary if your brand is new. If you have a few customers, you likely won’t have UGC to work with.

When you hire UGC creators, you can improve your brand awareness and social proof to attract more customers.

To start your UGC creator search, you can search relevant industry hashtags to see people who appear on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

From these searches, you can create a shortlist of creators to reach out to.

Now, to hire a UGC creator, you need to keep a few things in mind.

First, the UGC creator should have created UGC about products in your industry. This way, you’ll know they have an audience and credibility to create effective UGC for your product.

Second, encourage the UGC creator to be as real as possible. If UGC sounds too promotional, it can lose its effectiveness.

So, even if the creator finds something they dislike about the product, let them mention it. But overall, the user-generated content should be positive.

Once UGC creators create content, you can repost some of it on your company accounts.

For example, Forrest Jones creates user-generated content on TikTok for vehicle brands. So, manufacturers regularly send vehicles to him for review.

Then, he can drive the car for a few weeks before creating a review. However, this is a popular account, and most UGC creators only have a few thousand followers.

Of course, you can stop hiring UGC creators when you start getting organic UGC about your products.

Hiring a UGC creator can be a temporary way to create a buzz around your products and get content to feature on your social media accounts.

Tools to collect user-generated content (UGC)

These tools offer features ranging from running contests to creating landing pages for UGC.

Shortstack

ShortStack is a contest and landing page tool. 

With its contest features, you can run a hashtag contest on Twitter and Instagram. Shortstack will collect images and video posts with your hashtag for review. 

So, you can review the content pieces to find the ones suitable to your brand. Ensure you ask for permission before reposting content.

Apart from hashtags, Shortstack lets you create a UGC gallery. You can host this gallery on your website so that people can enter your contest and see entries from other customers.

Shortstack also has a contest rules template to use for your contests.

You can read my full Shortstack review to learn more.

SweepWidget

SweepWidget is also a giveaway and contest tool. 

With this tool, you can access entry options like: 

• Leave a review 
• Upload a file 
• Publish a post on a social media network 

Running these contests can give you a lot of UGC for your marketing campaigns.

You can read my SweepWidget review for more details.

Later

Later is a social media management tool.

But if you have a branded hashtag on Instagram, Later can help you collect posts using this hashtag.

Beyond that, you can collect media from post captions that mention your brand. You can also collect content from Instagram posts that tag your account.

There’s also an option to collect media from a URL and add them to your Later media library.

You can read my Later review to learn more.

Vista Social

Vista Social is another social media management tool.

With this tool, you can collect Instagram posts from your branded hashtags.

If you want to repost the UGC, Vista Social automatically adds credit to the original poster.

You can read my Vista Social review for more details.

Conclusion

User-generated content is one of the most trusted content types that moves you towards your marketing goals.

While collecting UGC is popular on social media, you can also collect it for your website pages.

This guide has explained the different ways to collect UGC for your social media accounts and website.

Exploit these methods to start collecting UGC for your brand today.

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