3 Tips to Utilize User-Generated Content

What actual customers say about your business often carries more weight with the public than anything you do. Cultivating and utilizing user-generated content on social platforms should be part of your marketing strategy.

Here are three tips for getting your customers to be your advocates. 

1. Utilize and promote hashtags. Hashtags are important on social media because they offer insight into how customers truly feel about your company. Want proof? Just pick a popular brand and search for #<brand>sucks. Cultivate positive hashtags and keep tabs on negative ones. Use positive hashtags as part of a broader branding strategy that includes both social media and other marketing channels, such as including hashtags in traditional advertising, product literature, or even printed on products themselves. 
2. Invite users to engage. The best time to engage customers is immediately after they received your product or service and are happy with it. Reach out and encourage them to post content online. Promotional campaigns and contests can also be helpful for engagement. 
3. Make creating content fun and easy. Rather than simply asking customers to write comments, encourage them to take fun pictures or video and tag with your hashtags. Include a link or widget on your website to make it easy. By monitoring your hashtags, you can collect, repost, and use those visual testimonials.