User-generated content platforms help you find and share positive social media about your brand.
Wall and ceiling contractors looking for ways to discover, curate and reshare all the positive comments on social media about their brand have a solution. “User-generated content” (UGC) platforms are designed to discover brand-affirming content on social media about your business and reshare it. UGC is when customers post about your company or brand on social media through comments, videos, reviews, testimonials and more. You can use UGC as authentic endorsements from the people who actually use your products and services.
The process is built on already existing testimonial services, which solicit brand-affirming content from your customers before it’s even created—and then automate most of the creation, editing and posting process for them.
“UGC is one of the best ways to cultivate and engage with your community—and foster brand loyalty,” said Tressa Robbins, content and social media manager at Burrelles, a media monitoring company.
Using social media to source user-generated content from customers “is a scalable and powerful solution for brands,” said Kyle Wong, chief strategy officer at Emplifi, a digital marketing firm.
For many wall and ceiling industry marketers, resharing authentic customer endorsements that crop up on social media seems like a no-brainer. But there also are some powerful numbers that affirm the practice. A 2023 study from EnTribe found that 86% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand that uses content from actual customers—rather than paid influencers. The same study found that 83% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that uses UGC content, rather than traditional advertising.
A Harris Poll study found that 58% of consumers place a high value on videos from customers who have already purchased a product or service. Equally eye-opening: 58% said endorsements from those existing customers were more important to them than product price, shipping costs or company return policies.
Many of us have seen these endorsement videos on YouTube and other social media platforms for years now. Some are impromptu video reviews by customers that offer the pros and cons of a product or service. Others are “unboxing” videos that give the basic facts about what to expect when you buy a particular product. Some videos are detailed demonstrations by satisfied customers that offer helpful tips on how to use a product—or how to use it most effectively.
How It Works
Before UGC platforms came along, marketers desiring customer testimonials often devoted much of their energies to inspire customers to create a video endorsement and then offered them services to make creation of those testimonials as simple as possible.
Now video testimonial services automate the entire process of customer solicitation for you. They also handle collection of the videos once they’re created by your customers. These services also will edit the customer-submitted videos for you and ensure the videos appear on your website and your social media channels.
All you need is a motivated customer with a smartphone and a desire to tell a story. From there, most of these services walk your customer through the video testimonial creation process, including suggestions on what they might want to post on your behalf.
The services also streamline the process for getting a video testimonial filed with your company, approved by your company and then published across the internet. Many of the services also can be integrated into your ecommerce software or platform, so that securing a new testimonial video is as easy as posting an invitation to submit on your website, sending an after-purchase email asking for a video testimonial or providing a link for your customer to click on after check-out.
Some services even enable you to post a QR code on your website, which your customer can scan with a smartphone, automatically triggering activation of the video testimonial creation-and-filing service for your business.
Most solutions also provide a release form for your customers to sign, giving your company the freedom to use their video testimonial anywhere in perpetuity.
The Power of Video
Some of the vendors offering video services include Widewail Invite Video, Vocal Video, VideoPeel, Vidmonials and Testimonial Hero. While all are solid picks for adding video solicitation to your marketing mix, Testimonial Hero is more hands-on that the rest. Rather than simply posting the raw video from your customer, Testimonial Hero will work with you to create a 90-second edit of that video, which provides more of a professional quality to the video.
UGC platforms complement their video testimonial services by adding another layer to your strategy: finding existing videos. Instead of attempting to inspire your customer to create a testimonial video, UGC platforms are designed to find endorsement videos online that have been independently created by your customers. These videos are out there just waiting to be reposted to your company’s website and social media channels.
These platforms also go beyond the video format to discover and repurpose other formats of UGC, including text-based social media posts, reviews and comments, as well as mentions on podcasts—and virtually any other form of content found in the digital space.
Many of these platforms offer tools that enable you to secure the media rights—when necessary—to repost the content. They can also enable you to auto-integrate UGC that’s favorable to your brand into your ecommerce store. For example, many of these platforms are designed to automatically integrate images of a number of positive tweets about your company onto your website homepage.
The top UGC platforms also offer analytics and reports, which detail how well content is performing on your website, in your ecommerce store and across social media.
UGC platforms are worth a serious look for any wall and ceiling business that wants to cast a wide net for all the positive—and already existing—customer content scattered across the social media ecosystem.
Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan.
