Have you ever scrolled through your Facebook feed or Instagram and seen one of your friends liking and sharing a post? All the time right? Think again, have any of those posts been about a brand, an experience at a party or a competition to win something? Now you are thinking yes and now you mention it I shared the post myself to join in. Are you guilty of that?

What is User Generated Content?

Generally speaking it is content which is created by an internet user, it can be a blog post, reviews, photos, articles, social media posts and much more. However they are a customer talking about that brand, they aren’t an employee of them. You might have your own blog where you opt to write your life story on, part of that story could be how you went to a carnival and had a smashing time, so you write a whole blog post about it, included photos and even hash-tagged the event.

That is now part of the carnivals user generated content.

How does is work and how does it have benefits?

Let’s carry on using the carnival as an example. Let’s call the carnival ‘The Somerset Light Festival’. So straight away the events team are powering away with social media posts, TV adverts, news paper adverts and maybe even door to door flyers. It’s a big event so it gets a lot of coverage but a huge percentage of that coverage will be user generated. How? Because ultimately people will be posting on social media about the event and asking their friends if they are going or sharing posts about the event to their friends to arrange times. They may even carry on using a particular hashtag from the carnivals social media post #somersetlightfestival, this practically becomes the internet version of word of mouth and you shouldn’t ignore it.

If you have an event you are advertising, the more content generated by your followers the better. The benefit? Most of the marketing is done for you and is spread wider.

What happens when you reward your loyal users? You start to create a brand ambassador. They share and care because they believe in the brand and its authenticity. The carnival is a great night but winning a competition for sharing your outfit to the social media wall is even better. The more they share, the more the audience grows and you could be using this marketing gold to boost your event marketing now.