#user-generatedcontent

In the age of social media and digital connectivity, consumers crave authenticity and transparency from brands more than ever before. Traditional advertising and marketing tactics are often met with skepticism, and consumers are increasingly turning to their peers for trusted recommendations and insights.

This is where user-generated content (UGC) comes into play, offering businesses a powerful tool for building authentic brand connections and fostering consumer trust.

According to Hootsuite, the key to developing and sharing effective content is to keep your audience’s interests, goals, and pain points in mind. An organization must know who their target audience is (demographics), understand what content will resonate with them (interests), and understand what they're up against (pain points) or why they became a customer. This iPage.com blog provides specific examples of how to create effective content based on your audience’s pain points.

 There are two ways to develop effective content: created and curated. Created content is produced within an organization, such as blog articles, white papers, infographics, guides, and visuals. It allows the organization to position themselves as a thought leader, with unique insight, knowledge, and perspective. It is also better for driving traffic to the organization’s website. A good rule of thumb is to post 40% created content and 60% curated content.

 Curated content is gathered from trusted sources, both internal and external. It is a great way to grow an organization’s social media audience and demonstrate the company’s position as a trusted advisor in an industry. Internal curation of content is repurposing or breaking apart the most effective created content into smaller bits. External curation of content can be either sharing user-generated posts or aggregating or distilling industry content that resonates with your audience and supports the values of your organization.

In their their writing, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks,” authors Cote and Pybus define immaterial labour 2.0 as “a more accelerated, intensified, and indeed inscrutable variant of the kind of activity initially proposed by Lazzarato or within the pages of Empire.” In essence, users embrace the idea of being subjects to databases and activity trackers. These users understand the intentions of social network sites, yet they continue to go on the site allowing themselves to complete the jobs of site designers and data trackers. Many may say, “This work will be done regardless because, as long as people continue to visit the site, data will be recorded.” Although this point is valid, could site administrators steal the work of many of the site’s most loyal visitors? 

Author Marianne Martens states, “Users of content and manufactured goods are increasingly involved in the production process.” Many young teens have the ability to assist in the improvement of their product or service through surveys presented on websites or just by using the product, in general. In regards to books and other writings, teens create blogs expressing what they enjoyed about the books or what they feel as though could have been better. Many authors take this information, without informing the owners of these blogs, and make money of blogger’s ideas.