What Is User-Generated Content & How Can It Help You?

Understanding & utilizing user-generated content is an incredibly powerful way to ensure your content expands its reach. Websites and platforms leveraging UGC often rank higher, have much better user engagement, and establish more brand loyalty than websites without. Learn everything you need to know about UGC below!

What Is User-Generated Content?

User-generated content, or (UGC) is content generated by the users of a website or platform. UGC is helpful for both users and search engines alike. Users get additional context, information, and interactivity from the other users. Search engines get to see how people are utilizing the website. Are many users creating content? Is that UGC getting shared, viewed, etc? UGC is a powerful tool to use when growing your content.

Why Is User-Generated Content Important?

User-Generated content is incredibly important for the owner of the website or platform because of the natural community UGC creates. UGC creates communities and brand loyalty. Without user-generated content it becomes much more difficult to create that same sense of community or loyalty.

UGC also helps ensure that your content always appears fresh to search engines each time they crawl your content. Whether one, or 1000 users have left comments, videos, etc., search engines will take that information in as a positive sign people value your content.

In addition to a sense of community, it is also much more profitable because users are often required to create accounts before they can create content.

USG & Account Creation

In most cases, users are required to create an account in order to leave or create any content that other users might see. So not only are you able to ensure you entice more people to sign-up, but you also can often find creative ways to leverage free accounts into paid accounts by offering promotions, bonuses, affiliate programs, etc.

Types of User-Generated Content

There are many more types of UGC than we are going to cover here. But here are some of the most common types of user-generated content, or sources of user-generated content.

Reviews

Reviews are great examples of UGC. The benefits of UGC in this way would be that the reviews typically would help give other users the confidence required to make a purchase.

Testimonials

Just like reviews, testimonials are a great way to show social proof, and instill a sense of confidence to your users. Having this type of UGC will increase your conversions dramatically, especially if you have a way to verify the authenticity of the testimonials.

Comments

Comments are an excellent way to keep your articles fresh in the eyes of search engines, but also ensure they remain relevant and interesting to your users. They'll see the comments and often feel the need to pitch in with some additional advice, context, or even to just respond to another user. You'll often see a budding community in the comment sections of various blogs or forums as well.

Never underestimate the power of comments, as communities grow when comments are provided. Comments are a great way to keep your content fresh.

Forum Posts

On certain websites, users are often allowed to create entire posts. These types of posts are great because they automatically create new pages, and these pages are designed to get people commenting as well. So forums and forum posts are structured to create not only new pages (which will be indexed), but also to help flesh out those pages automatically. Your users are essentially growing your website for you!

Forum Comments

Just like normal comments, forum comments act in much the same way. The main difference however, is that forum comments are often much more communal. There is a often a ranking program in which the more users interact and help one another, the higher their status in the forum becomes. In addition, the commenting capabilities are often much more elaborate in forums than in simple blog posts or articles.

The users of forum posts will often be able to post various types of media, content, and other sorts of digital assets as well. Whereas typically in normal comment sections, they can only leave text, and there is not usually an incentive to respond to or help other users.

Live Streams

On some websites, you can broadcast yourself streaming live. These types of websites allow users to leave live comments, and interact with not only the streamer, but also other commentors.

Podcasts

Podcast websites inspire people to create custom podcasts where users are welcome to tune in, subscribe, leave comments, etc.

How Do These Types of USG Help?

These types of user-generated content help the owners of the website grow the community and demand for the content they are offering. It inspires people to become members, and often it inspires them to help build your community as well.

The primary benefit behind UGC is the sense of community. Where there is a sense of community, people will remain loyal. In addition, another main benefit is automated content creation. Websites that grow will be seen as more reliable and trustworthy by search engines, so harnessing UGC will help keep your content fresh and growing in their eyes.

User-Generated Content Often Requires Monitoring & Systems

User-generated content often has algorithms monitoring it. But, if you are unable to implement algorithms (and even with algorithms) you'll need to ensure that you continually monitor your content. Continual monitoring will ensure that users aren't harassing others, and that the type of content being created on your website aligns with your brand.

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