User-generated content (UGC) is a term used to describe any form of content created by users, such as reviews, posts, photos, and videos. UGC is a type of crowdsourced content, meaning that it is created by multiple individuals instead of one person or company.
The importance of UGC to businesses lies in its ability to build trust with customers and prospects. When potential customers see that other people have had positive experiences with a product or service, they are more likely to do the same. By leveraging UGC, businesses can create social proof for their offerings and make it easier for prospects to make an informed decision about whether or not they should buy something. Additionally, UGC can be used to increase brand awareness and engagement on social media platforms.
Unlike traditional forms of marketing content like ads and press releases, UGC is more personal in nature and provides authentic insights into the experience of using a particular product or service. This creates a level of transparency and honesty that consumers appreciate, as well as making them feel like they’re part of the process. On top of this, UGC can often be shared in different formats across various channels including social media sites, blogs, forums etc., thereby giving businesses extended reach and increasing the chances for success.
On the other hand, crowdsourced content itself is an external form of content created by many different people who may or may not be affiliated with the business itself. As opposed to user-generated content which comes from within an existing customer base or active community members (people who already have some sort of relationship with the company), crowdsourced content tends to involve gathering input from outside sources such as market research firms or specialized platforms. Though both use multiple people's opinions to gain insights into certain areas – such as user preferences – crowdsourced data typically relies more on quantitative data while user generated data has more qualitative elements in it.
UGC is worth what you are permitted to do with it. The expensive mistake is collecting photos and video under terms that allow a repost and nothing more, then finding the best asset cannot run as paid creative or sit on a product page — the two placements with the clearest commercial return. Ask for that permission at submission; rights are almost never retrofitted across hundreds of contributors. Then size the prize before building the workflow. Assume a product page taking 4,000 sessions a month, converting at 2% on a $70 order - illustrative figures, not benchmarks: that is about $5,600 a month, so a hypothetical one-tenth lift in conversion would be roughly $560 a month from that page alone. That figure is the hurdle collection and moderation has to clear, and it decides which pages get customer photos first.
Collecting UGC and actually putting it to use are two different problems: the review requests, photo and video submission prompts, and moderation workflow are handled by a reviews and UGC platform like Okendo, Yotpo, or Stamped, while deciding where that content gets reused — product pages, paid ad creative, landing pages — is a distribution question that belongs in content strategy planning rather than left to whichever team happens to notice a good photo.
For the collection and moderation workflow itself, this guide to using user-generated content on Shopify covers how to gather it and where it earns its place on the site.
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