24 Nov How to Inspire User-Generated Content Creation on Social Media
When you want to build a strong brand and maintain a powerful connection to current and potential customers, user-generated content creation on social media is key. It makes your customers feel involved, heard, and validated. While you want your own team engaged in content creation on social media, having users participate increases your reach. If you’re ready to learn how to get everyone excited about posting through your social media accounts, explore some of the top options at Pic Station.
1. Build an Engaged Audience
The first step towards better content creation on social media is building an audience that wants to be involved. You want people who do more than just like! You want your followers to comment, tag you in posts, and more! Here are a few tips to help you build a highly engaged community:
- Balance fun posts with utility posts
- Don’t ask them to spam their friends
- Treat all users the same — no matter their follower amounts or fame
- Stick with a core demographic
- Keep all interactions integrated — no separate forums
2. Get a Photo Booth for Your Events
Most companies are expected to host several events throughout the year for their staff, industry associates, launch parties, and more. When you plan these events, consider social media integration for all your attendees. Photo booths are incredibly popular among guests and they help with social media engagement.
At Pic Station, we offer photo booth rentals that allow your guests to post their photos directly to social media. This user-generated content creation on social media ensures your company gets a massive influx of posts, likes, and comments throughout the night — building your brand quickly without doing all the work!
3. Offer Incentives
People love getting free stuff. To get your followers to contribute, offer them incentives for content creation on your social media platforms. Some prizes could include a spotlight feature and interview, using their photos in your branding, offering them discounts on services, or giving away a free product. When offering these incentives, consider the value of the incentive compared to the content you’re generating. More intensive work for your users should result in an incentive of a higher value to them.
4. Use Hashtags
On Twitter and Instagram especially, the hashtag is king. While you should be using them in your content creation for social media, you can also encourage your followers to use custom hashtags as well.
At Pic Station, we specialize in event photo booths, but we offer more unique services than many other photo booth companies. One of our most effective products for user engagement includes the hashtag printer. You can use this service to aggregate any photo of your event that has been shared by a guest all in one place. Once you create a custom hashtag, guests can share their own photos on social media using it. Your hashtag printer has access to all those photos and we can print them during the event — no matter who took them!
Now guests have an incentive to post more user-generated content creation on social media while hashtagging your event because they can print their photos right away!
5. Create Contests
You may have seen online contests asking followers to draw something in their style, compose a poem about an event, or make a video about a certain topic. Creativity gets most people excited and they love making something that gets recognition from their peers. Launch a contest for your brand that’s appropriate and interesting to your followers. You’ll end up with amazing content creation for social media that requires minimal work from your team.
Depending on the difficulty of the contest, set a time limit for submissions and choose the top few to feature on your accounts. After the contest is over, announce and reward the winner with a cool prize!
6. Ask for Feedback
Asking for customer feedback engages tons of users who like sharing their opinions. It could also start a conversation on your social media platforms that will ensure high viewership and visitation of a specific post or your profile as a whole. Since the newest social media algorithms aren’t chronological, ensuring your posts get a lot of views and comments is one of the best ways to guarantee that they reach as many followers as possible.
This type of content creation on social media is driven by comments, but the more feedback you ask for, the more views you generate and improvements you can make.
7. Customer Models
If you offer a product that can be easily shown off or reviewed by your customers, ask them to submit photos or videos of themselves using or wearing your products. You get many benefits from using customers as models and reviewers including saving money on professional shoots and advertisements. This user-generated content creation on social media will also reach more than just your followers — it will also net the followers of anyone who agrees to participate by submitting their photos and videos.
Inspire Your Customers
Content creation on social media is a powerful way to establish your brand, advertise your services, and expand your viewership. Use it wisely to ensure you’re making the most of what each platform has to offer.
For more advice on the power of social media, explore the Pic Station blog today!