Leveraging user-generated content is a proven tactic to generate awareness about your brand and generate traction online.
Here, it’s not you promoting your solutions and justifying why the intended audience should prefer you over other alternatives.
It’s the users of your products or services sharing their experiences and convincing others to take your solutions for a spin.
Even when people share their negative experiences, the insights help you identify the room for improvement and ensure consistent product development.
However, not all user-generated content is legitimate. So, before using it, you must assess its authenticity.
In this article, we will mention the seven easy steps for you that will help you determine authentic user-generated content.
What is User-Generated Content?
Before we dive into the details, let’s talk about user-generated content first for those who are not familiar with the concept.
User-generated content influences the buying decisions of 79% of people. It’s the type of content that the target audience produces for the respective brands.
The creators of this content are people who have interacted with the brand in one way or another or the users of its products or services.
User-generated content generally encompasses people’s experiences. These experiences may represent different stages of the buyer’s journey.
The UGC may favor the brands, but it can also affect their reputation, as the customer experiences can be positive or negative.
Even though people consider user-generated content to be the most authentic, brands should verify the credibility of information before using it.
Spreading information from unreliable sources may do more harm than good and severely affect a brand’s reputation.
Importance of Authenticating User-Generated Content
User-generated content may not always come from your customers. Your competitors can hire people to spread misinformation about your brand.
They may onboard agencies and launch negative marketing campaigns to tarnish your brand’s image in the industry.
Furthermore, people may also spread false information about you just for fun or because of a personal agenda.
They may publish negative reviews and testimonials using fake profiles to ruin the name you’ve made for yourself.
Even genuine user-generated content may encompass inaccurate facts or details. Therefore, you should authenticate UGC before using it to drive more traffic.
Steps to Authenticate User-Generated Content
Now that you know how critical it is to validate user-generated content, let’s go through the steps of the authentication process.
- Explore Relevant Channels for Information
The first step to authenticate user-generated content is to identify relevant sources of information.
The intended audience may leverage diverse platforms to publish their reviews about your products or services and share their experiences. These platforms include social media apps, online communities, review websites, and so on.
To get started with UGC authentication, you should select the platforms that your audience prefers. It helps you access relevant information with ease.
Due to an overwhelming increase in content consumption through social media, it may be safe to assume that your customers will likely pick the social media platforms they prefer to post their reviews.
However, you should not eliminate the possibility of your audience leveraging third-party platforms other than social media to talk about their interactions with your brand. On a separate note, conducting your own customer satisfaction surveys can help you get a sense of what you might expect to find elsewhere online too.
- Access User-Generated Content
Once you have identified the platforms that your audience may prefer to share their stories, the next step is to access user-generated content. It may be a daunting activity to find relevant threads among millions of discussions initiated on a daily basis.
Tracking your brand mentions may do the trick. You can consider using social listening solutions or tools that help you assess audience sentiment to keep an eye on relevant discussions and explore potential UGC.
- Locate the Content Creator
The next step for you to consider is to locate the content creators and verify their identity. A lot of people publish reviews or testimonials through fake accounts, which puts a huge question mark on the credibility of the content.
If you choose to leverage UGC, you must ensure that the creator publishes the content through a legitimate ID.
Knowing the content creator’s identity makes it easier for you to decide if the information available is credible or misleading.
- Verify the Information Source
When you use the content published by someone else, you must verify the authenticity of the information source.
User-generated content does not always encompass first-hand experience. Sometimes, people just conduct their research and share their opinions about respective brands.
In this case, you must identify the information source that the intended audience used to create content and verify its legitimacy.
In situations where people claim to be the users of your products or services and share their experiences, you must verify whether or not their claims to be the users of your solutions are accurate.
- Validate Context
User-generated content may not always be factually accurate. Even when people share genuine reviews or testimonials, there’s still room for error.
For example, a user may claim that your solutions may not have certain features or capabilities. Now, it may be true. However, it may also be possible that they simply haven’t explored those features when using the solutions you offer.
So, you can’t take everything they say at face value. You need to cross-reference what the users say with other credible sources of information to fact-check user-generated content before shortlisting it to fuel your social proof.
- Conduct Technical Analysis
You may need to conduct technical analysis when user-generated content is a bit more sophisticated than reviews, testimonials, or review posts.
People can use technology to create manipulative visual content, which may require image or video analysis.
You can conduct technical analysis yourself if you’re familiar with digital forensics techniques. If not, you can decide to onboard an expert and take their help to assess the content’s credibility.
- Crowdsource UGC Verification
It’s another verification technique to fact-check content and assess its credibility. The only difference is that you let the public verify the information for you.
You can leverage online communities like Reddit and other relevant platforms to validate the information, enabling people to vet the user-generated content for you.
Final Words
There you have it: the seven easy steps to determine authentic user-generated content for social proof.
The smart use of UGC allows you to get more eyeballs and capture quality leads for your sales funnel. However, you need to be careful when leveraging user-generated content as social proof.
The reputation of your brand is at stake. So, you wouldn’t want to spread factually inaccurate information about you.
User-generated content also helps you improve your solutions and ensure continuous improvement. By validating the UGC, you can effectively uncover the pain points of your audience and make necessary adjustments to the solutions you offer.
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