How User-Generated Content Can Help Your Business

October 15, 2018 Teresa Clark

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Blogging, Content, Marketing, Social media, Websites

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User-generated content is a new buzz phrase that’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Websites can take off in popularity if they have great user-generated content, without the creators putting much work into content creation.

What exactly is user-generated content? How does it work? How do you encourage user-generated content? Let’s take a look.

User-generated content is any content that’s generated by a company’s user base and not by content creators. High profile examples include Wikipedia and YouTube. The staff at Wikipedia and YouTube don’t spend their time creating entries or videos. Instead, their job is to make it easy for other people to create content. Lower profile examples include forums and blog comments. Again, these aren’t created by the site owner but can still draw a lot of search engine traffic.

So how does one encourage people to create more content?

Give them room to express something they want to express. – It’s very hard to create desire. Trying to get someone to want something they don’t already want is very hard. On the other hand, giving someone an avenue to talk about things they already want to talk about can be a great shortcut to amassing a ton of user generated content. YouTube exemplifies this principle. YouTube didn’t create the desire for people to share videos; it just made that desire possible through the internet. What do your users already want to talk about that they’re not able to talk about yet?

Make them feel like they’re part of something – A sense of community and purpose can go a long way toward inspiring content generation. A forum, for example, often thrives when there’s a sense of people helping one another. On the other hand, forums where there’s animosity and lack of community tend to die down over time. Wikipedia also does this really well. People feel like they’re part of a larger purpose and that their time put into generating content is for a good cause.

Make it fun – Don’t make it feel like work to generate content. Make it fun. When Gmail wanted to have users create a video for them, they didn’t make it sound like work. Instead, they made it sound like a contest and made all the descriptions of the video they wanted very bright. They got tons of submissions and had a stellar video to use at the end of the day.

If you’re not employing user-generated content as part of your web strategy, you’re missing out. The content your users can generate can bring a lot of traffic to your website with barely any additional cost.