User-generated content: market your business with the voice of your customers
Try an experiment. Search online for a review of a product you want, such as the headphones or running shoes you’ve been eyeing for months. Among the top results, often before specialized sites or the brand itself, you’ll find a Reddit thread or maybe a TikTok video that shows you that product in action in 30 seconds, without filters.
What you are seeing is the effect of a profound and consolidated transformation, which we have summarized by saying that “search goes beyond Google”: it is no longer just a dialogue between you and a search engine, but a conversation between people, to which Google and now also AI engines have decided to give a place of honor.
This is where user-generated content (UGC) takes on a central role in your brand’s visibility, because the voice of your customers has become a powerful marketing channel, an indispensable tool for being relevant in artificial intelligence responses and for building a solid presence that goes far beyond traditional SEO. It’s time to analyze the scope of this phenomenon and learn how to manage it.
What is UGC and what does user-generated content mean?
User-generated content, or UGC for short, is any form of content created and shared spontaneously by people, rather than directly by a brand. It can be text, a photo, a video, a review, or a podcast: the basic characteristic is always authenticity.
There are three main characteristics of UGC: it must be public, i.e., shared on channels accessible to everyone (a private chat is not UGC); it must be original, i.e., created outside the professional logic of agencies or editorial offices; and it must involve a creative effort on the part of the user. Added to these are spontaneity and ease of creation, which trigger a virtuous circle of content production and consumption.
The attention economy is saturated with advertising messages, and you have learned to develop a natural distrust of corporate content because you recognize it as planned and aimed at an obvious commercial goal. UGC fills this trust gap: it is a genuine voice telling a real story.
It comes from direct experience, tells something personal, and for this reason, you perceive it as genuine and credible. It is the digital version of word of mouth, advice that comes from one of your peers and, for this very reason, has a value and power of persuasion that is immensely superior to any marketing campaign. Think about your own experience: do you trust a glossy advertisement more, or an enthusiastic review from another user who has already tried that product?
The different expressions of authenticity: types and formats of UGC
User-generated content forms a continuous and multifaceted stream that can be found in every corner of the web. UGC is literally content created by ordinary people, and if you think about it, this mechanism is not new, because there are hundreds of different types of sites based on this philosophy, from Wikipedia to Tripadvisor, from YouTube to Flickr and Instagram, just to name a few colossal examples. In practical terms, each type of UGC responds to a specific need of the audience and offers a different opportunity for your brand.
- Reviews and testimonials. The most direct form of social proof, the one you look for as a user. This is the feedback that people actively read before making a purchase decision, consulting product pages, Google’s rich result stars, or third-party platforms such as Trustpilot, whose independent authority makes them a powerful and highly trusted source. To put it simply, a positive and detailed review is a powerful accelerator of conversions.
- Visual content (photos and videos). Storytelling becomes even more powerful when you see it: this UGC shared on Instagram or TikTok shows the product in its real environment, integrated into everyday life, and creates an immediate emotional connection that studio images struggle to replicate. They capture attention and create a direct connection with the audience.
- Comments on the website. You build a different, deeper, and more lasting value when you bring this conversation to your website, which remains a central asset for your strategy. Opening a comments section on your blog, for example, transforms a static page into living content, which is enriched over time with readers’ questions and experiences. In this way, you try to create a community on your digital property and add context and relevance to your pages, but you expose yourself to the need for careful management.
- Posts and comments on social media. These are the pulse of the situation, the real-time conversation that develops around your brand. Every comment, mention, or post is a valuable insight, instant feedback that measures sentiment and engagement around you and allows you to understand what your community really thinks.
- Discussions on forums and communities. Forums are not as popular today as they once were, but platforms such as Reddit and Quora survive and are mines of in-depth information. Here, users don’t just leave an opinion, they ask questions, offer solutions, and engage in complex debates. It is precisely this type of content, rich in context and natural language, that Google and artificial intelligence are increasingly rewarding.
Who creates UGC: customers, employees, and the new figure of the UGC creator
Now it’s time to understand who the players are in this widespread narrative, which can be divided into two broad categories: “natural” and “paid.”
Paid UGC occurs when a company incentivizes content creation through contests, campaigns, or paid collaborations with influencers. Although this form of UGC may seem less authentic, if handled with transparency and integrity, it can be just as effective. This practice is becoming increasingly popular, especially among newer brands that want to share this type of content but don’t yet have enough customers sharing photos. Paid UGC is created by special creators—who are different from influencers—and is generally perceived as as sincere as normal UGC. UGC creators can be found through platforms such as Fiverr or Upwork, but if the brand is well known enough, it may attract these professionals “naturally.”
Organic or natural UGC, on the other hand, is content that arises without direct solicitation, such as a photo shared on Instagram of a dish in a restaurant or a tweet expressing appreciation for a service received. This is content that real-life customers post and repost on their own initiative. These genuine moments of sharing have a significant impact on brand perception; they are the most authentic type of content and what a brand hopes to receive from its customers.
On the other side of the fence, there are at least three types of UGC “creators.”
- Customers and fans. This is the purest form of content, called UGC. It is generated spontaneously by people who have interacted with your brand and decide to share their experience without any request, compensation, or incentive. It is digital word of mouth in its most authentic and powerful form, the real driver of trust—and it is also the most difficult to “manage” and predict.
- Employees. EGC (Employee-Generated Content) is content created by people who work within your company. A product manager explaining a new feature, a technician showing the “behind the scenes” of a process: EGC combines internal expertise with the credibility of a human voice, offering a unique and reliable perspective that humanizes the brand.
- Professionals. Today, there is a new specific professional figure, the UGC Creator: their job is to create authentic and spontaneous-looking content that is then sold to the brand, which will use it on its own channels (social media, website, advertising campaigns). Unlike traditional influencers, they do not aim to promote a product to their audience: they are creative partners who produce “authenticity on commission” for you, content that looks genuine and spontaneous. You acquire this material and distribute it on your channels, maintaining full control over high-quality content that is native to social platforms and perceived by the public as much more credible than traditional advertising.
The profession of UGC creator: how to get started and why it is an opportunity
However, we need to pause on this last point, because there is enormous interest in the role of the UGC creator, as it represents a concrete and accessible career opportunity in digital marketing—and you can embark on this path if you think you have a talent for storytelling and a good command of social media video formats, as well as basic multimedia editing skills.
Unlike an influencer, your main asset is not the number of followers you have, but your skills, starting with the ability to create content, especially videos, that appear authentic and native to social media platforms. Your calling card is your portfolio: you can start building it by creating “speculative” videos (i.e., on your own initiative) for products you already own and love, showing potential brands your style. Once you have a solid portfolio, you can approach companies directly or sign up for freelance platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr, which have sections dedicated to this type of professional.
For many, this profession offers great flexibility and a channel to express their creativity, turning it into a source of income and a qualified entry point into the world of digital communication. From a financial point of view, earnings vary depending on your experience, the complexity of the content, and the usage rights you grant. In general, rates for a single video can range from around €50 to over €500.
From Web 2.0 to today: the genesis of user-generated content
To grasp the scope of this transformation, think about what the web was like in the early 2000s.
Your role was almost always passive: you consumed content prepared and served by websites, with very little opportunity for direct interaction. The Web 2.0 revolution, driven by the social media boom around 2005 and the widespread use of smartphones, changed the rules of the game. As a user, you ceased to be just a consumer of information and also became a producer, a hybrid figure known as a “prosumer”.
This ease of creation and sharing triggered a virtuous circle of continuous interaction, giving rise to a mass phenomenon that marketing has tapped into to build a more participatory and valuable relationship with its audience.
Beyond traditional SEO: why your strategy today depends on UGC
The authority you build is increasingly linked to your participation and the value you offer in communities, an evolution that makes your strategy, if based solely on the classic pillars of SEO, a vision that today risks being partial and incomplete.
Does this sound like a cliché?
A recent analysis of visibility in AI engines (including Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT) revealed that Reddit.com is the most cited domain overall, with approximately 66,000 mentions in over 800 sites analyzed. Together with YouTube and Quora, it dominates the sources used by artificial intelligence to formulate their responses. This data should give you the “proof” and the push you need to shift the focus of your visibility: your ranking today increasingly depends on your ability to be present in these discussions.
Google rewards conversations: Reddit and TikTok are conquering SERPs
The prominence of these platforms in AI responses is the culmination of a trend you already see in traditional SERPs. The increasingly visible integration of results from discussions and forums stems from Google’s strategy to respond to your main search intent: to find authentic experiences. For many queries, especially those that require evaluations and opinions, you seek the direct opinion of other people. Recognizing this need, Google treats a discussion among users with a weight similar to, and sometimes greater than, that of an institutional web page.
But the reason you’re seeing Reddit and TikTok more and more in SERPs is also linked to the introduction of the “E” for Experience in Google’s E-E-A-T framework. This evolution of its quality guidelines is the official recognition that you, as a user, are looking for content that demonstrates direct, first-hand experience. And where is this experience found in abundance? In people’s spontaneous conversations. This need is confirmed by user behavior data: a famous internal Google analysis revealed that nearly 40% of young people, when looking for a place to eat lunch, don’t start with Google Maps, but with TikTok or Instagram. You’re looking for visual experience and unfiltered advice from other people. As a result, to remain relevant, Google’s algorithm has adapted to find and reward these experiences. The result has been an exponential increase in visibility for conversational platforms. Some industry analyses, for example, show that Reddit’s domain saw a +1,328% jump in organic visibility between 2023 and 2024.
The practical effect of this transformation is that Google increasingly integrates results from these platforms directly into SERPs, bringing user conversations to the forefront and treating them as an authoritative, high-quality source. It is the need to provide “information gain,” or fresh perspectives and new information that branded content often lacks. For example, in the US version, the “Discussions and forums” box often appears in search results, bringing user conversations to the forefront because they respond more directly and authentically to the user’s need for validation.
Official confirmation from Google: we have adapted the ranking to new user behavior
In one of its most direct admissions in recent times, Google has confirmed that it has actively (and effectively) modified its ranking systems to give greater visibility to formats such as short-form videos, forums, and UGC in general. This was stated by Liz Reid, head of Google Search, in a recent interview on the Wall Street Journal podcast, where she also explained the reasons behind this decision. Namely, a “change in behavior” among users, especially younger ones, who seek answers on these platforms before turning to traditional websites. “We have to respond to what users want to hear,” Reid said, adding that “over time, we have adjusted our ranking to bring more of this type of content to the forefront in response to what we have heard from users.”
This “adjustment” is not a spur-of-the-moment action, but the result of Google’s testing cycle: the company identifies a trend in user behavior, experiments with algorithm changes to accommodate it, measures reactions, and, if positive, allows the system to “learn” and permanently integrate the change. The implications are enormous, and Reid herself reiterated a fundamental concept: “Whenever you make changes, there are winners and losers. This is true for any ranking update.” In this case, the “losers” could be sites with high-quality content that lose traffic not because of a decline in authority, but because, for certain queries, Google has decided that a video or forum discussion is a better answer and more in line with current user expectations.
SEO strategy, therefore, can no longer ignore a multi-format approach, which combines the creation of in-depth web pages with the production of short videos and an active and strategic presence in industry communities and forums.
Fuel for AI engines: why artificial intelligence trusts UGC
This dynamic reaches its peak with AI-based search engines, which operate on mechanisms such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which allows artificial intelligence to draw on a wide range of external sources to construct its responses. In this process, UGC platforms with their conversational and first-hand content are a privileged and almost priority source—in other words, in conversations on Reddit and Quora, generative models find an abundance of the vast, up-to-date, and natural linguistic “fuel” they need.
As mentioned, recent analysis of over 800 websites confirms that among the most cited domains by AI globally are Reddit.com (with approximately 66,000 mentions), YouTube.com (approximately 19,000), and Quora.com (approximately 8,000), along with information giants such as Wikipedia. This preference for UGC platforms highlights a strategic point: the breadth of your content coverage (the number of organic keywords you rank for) now has a stronger correlation with AI visibility (0.41) than the number of backlinks (0.37). This approach, however, needs to be adapted to the sector: in areas such as entertainment, UGC is the dominant source; in others, such as healthcare, academic and government sources still carry more weight.
This means that for AI, it is more important for you to be a comprehensive source that is present in discussions than a source that is “only” authoritative according to traditional metrics. UGC provides the “real-world context, diverse perspectives, and niche expertise” that AI needs to generate accurate, comprehensive, and natural responses. This is the heart of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): optimizing your content and online presence to become a source that AI can cite. If AI tends to cite a few sources for each answer, being one of those sources guarantees you disproportionate visibility, greatly raising the stakes.
Building real trust: social proof that breaks down skepticism and increases conversions
Beyond the visibility guaranteed by algorithms, the real business impact of UGC is measured by trust. As a consumer, you are bombarded with ads and promotional messages every day, and your attention span and trust are at an all-time low. The social proof that emerges from a review, photo, or discussion breaks down this skepticism.
The numbers confirm this: 98% of people consider reviews to be an essential factor in the purchasing process, some estimates indicate a conversion increase of more than 20% on sites that integrate UGC, and about 9 out of 10 people say they trust another person’s recommendation more than branded content. Their omnichannel nature makes them effective at every stage of your sales funnel, from discovering a new product to making the final decision. Integrating these voices into your product pages and campaigns allows you to show, rather than simply state, the value of your offering.
Brands such as GoPro, which has built its entire marketing strategy on breathtaking videos shot by its users, and Airbnb, which showcases destinations through authentic traveler stories, understood before others that the most compelling storytelling comes from their own customers. Integrating these voices into your product pages and campaigns allows you to highlight the value of your offering, using the satisfaction of existing customers as the most powerful driver for acquiring new ones.
From spectator to director: how to run a User Generated Content campaign
Now that you know the theoretical basics and practical advantages of User Generated Content, it’s time to take action: orchestrating a UGC strategy shifts your role from passive observer of conversations to active director.
Planning (and the ability to plan a strategy) does not mean distorting the spontaneity of UGC, but creating the ideal conditions for it to manifest itself in a way that is aligned with your goals. You need to build a bridge between your community and your brand, providing the right stimuli, tools, and reasons for people to want to tell their story with you.
The process consists of three specific phases: stimulating the creativity of the audience through targeted campaigns and incentives; managing the flow of incoming content with listening, analysis, and curation tools; and governing risks, which includes both responding to feedback and complying with legal aspects of copyright. Your goal is to create a planned system that transforms user spontaneity into a controlled, consistent marketing asset that is aligned with your brand’s goals.
User motivation: what drives people to create content
Before asking your audience to create content for you, it is essential to understand what motivates them to do so. The motivations are diverse and often intertwined.
Many users are driven by a desire to express themselves and their creativity. Others act out of a sense of belonging to a community, wanting to contribute to a conversation and feel part of a group. Another strong driver is the desire to be helpful, sharing a positive experience or a solution to a problem to help others make a better choice. Finally, there is the lever of incentives, which can range from simple public recognition (being shared on a brand’s official channels) to concrete rewards, such as discounts, free products, or winning a contest.
Your incentive strategy will be all the more effective if it leverages these intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Stimulating creativity: how to launch campaigns, hashtags, and contests that work
To trigger content production by your audience, it is therefore useful to offer clear motivation and direction. The most successful UGC campaigns are born from a simple and engaging creative idea. Think of Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, which turned a bottle into a personal message, or Starbucks’ “#RedCupContest,” which invited customers to use an iconic object as a blank canvas. The key to success is providing a creative “pretext” and a memorable hashtag that acts as an aggregator. You can also launch contests that reward the best content, as GoPro does with its “Million Dollar Challenge.” The right incentive, which is sometimes simply the promise of visibility on the brand’s official channels, can motivate your community to participate, making them feel like protagonists in your narrative.
Managing the flow: monitoring, curating, and amplifying UGC on and off your site
Once you have stimulated content production, you need to be ready to manage the flow. The first step is listening, using social listening tools to intercept those who use your official hashtag and also all spontaneous mentions of your brand. The second step is content curation: you need to select the best materials, those most in line with your image and most effective from a communication point of view. Finally, comes amplification: the best UGC can be strategically reused across all your channels, from your e-commerce product pages to newsletters, to become creative material for your advertising campaigns, which will perform much better because they are based on images and videos that are perceived as authentic.
Speaking of amplification, user-generated content is most effective when you integrate it directly into your digital properties. Bringing the authenticity of UGC to your site strengthens trust at the crucial moment of the conversion journey. You can place the most significant reviews and testimonials directly on your home page or landing pages. On product pages, you can create galleries with photos and videos submitted by customers, showing how products look and work in a real-world context rather than in a photo studio. An even more effective strategy is to integrate widgets from external platforms, displaying the aggregate score and reviews collected on portals such as Trustpilot directly on your site. This way, you bring the authority of a third-party source into your domain, further reducing visitor mistrust. Activating a curated comments section on your blog or creating a community page can also transform your site from a showcase to a gathering place, increasing user retention and loyalty.
Challenges and risks: from moderation to legal issues
Opening an honest channel of dialogue with your community also means preparing to manage the risks that come with it. The first is related to control: not all user-generated content will be of high quality or in line with your image. It is essential to define clear guidelines and have a moderation process, which can be automatic through filters or manual, to ensure an adequate standard.
The critical issue is that low-quality content, spam, duplicates, or aggressive comments can penalize the user experience and the ranking of your pages. To manage these issues safely, you can adopt several practical strategies also suggested by Google. On a technical level, for content that requires review, you can temporarily use the tag noindex to prevent it from being indexed until you approve it. For links posted by users in comments, you can use the attribute rel=“ugc”, signaling to Google that these are external links over which you do not have full control. On a broader level, your moderation can follow some specific guidelines: publish a clear content policy to define what is acceptable; implement a system (even automatic) to review content before or after publication; use a CAPTCHA to limit bots; offer users a way to report inappropriate content, involving them in the moderation process.
The second risk concerns reputation management: inevitably, you will also receive negative feedback. Seeing criticism not as an attack, but as an opportunity, is the winning approach, and responding in a transparent, empathetic, and decisive manner can turn a dissatisfied customer into a supporter. This responsiveness is doubly important on public review platforms such as Trustpilot, where your interaction with a dissatisfied customer is visible to everyone and becomes a direct testament to your approach to customer care.
Finally, you must pay close attention to legal issues. Using a user’s photo or video without their explicit consent can expose you to serious copyright issues. The best practice is to define a clear policy and always ask for written permission before republishing any content, to protect both you and your users.
UGC in action: concrete examples and future trends
In recent years, the strategic application of UGC has brought to light various success stories. For example, it has allowed brands such as LEGO to co-create products with their community through the LEGO Ideas platform, transforming fan suggestions into official sets, while Givenchy Beauty has leveraged UGC creators to generate authentic conversation around the launch of a new product, resulting in content that is perceived as more genuine. These strategies are now evolving towards social commerce, where content can be purchased directly on platforms such as TikTok Shop, and towards integration with artificial intelligence, which on the one hand uses UGC for its responses and on the other offers brands new tools to analyze and optimize campaigns.
Case studies: brands that have turned users into a marketing channel
As mentioned, LEGO has gone beyond the concept of a simple campaign with the LEGO Ideas platform, where it invites the community to actively propose new sets. Ideas are voted on by other users, and the most popular ones are evaluated by LEGO designers for potential commercial production. In this way, it has generated extremely high and continuous engagement, but above all, it has also obtained market research at no cost and products that already have a fan base before they even exist.
Another effective approach is that of Givenchy Beauty for the launch of its Prisme Libre powder. Instead of a traditional campaign, it activated eight UGC creators on TikTok and Instagram, giving them complete creative freedom. Creator Jingherly, for example, turned her review into entertaining content that generated spontaneous conversation, demonstrating how this approach is perfect for launching a product in a credible and native way on social platforms.
The future is conversational: the evolution of UGC in AI and social commerce
Today, the role of UGC is becoming increasingly integrated into business processes. The first major evolution can be seen in social or discovery commerce, with platforms such as TikTok Shop and Pinterest breaking down the barrier between inspiration and purchase. A UGC video in which a user shows how they use your product becomes an interactive and directly purchasable showcase: in this way, you close the circle between discovery, guided by authentic content, and conversion, which takes place seamlessly within the same experience.
The second direction of development is driven by artificial intelligence, which plays a dual role. On the one hand, as already discussed, AI engines will continue to use UGC as their primary source for responses, making your presence in those conversations vital to your visibility. On the other hand, AI becomes a tool at your disposal to optimize UGC strategies: you can use it to analyze thousands of pieces of content and identify trends, to select the most suitable creators based on performance data, and to personalize content distribution, maximizing effectiveness and return on investment.
From authenticity to strategy: FAQs and final thoughts on UGC
From a spontaneous phenomenon to an essential element of a mature marketing strategy, user-generated content has completed its evolution. Ignoring it or managing it superficially means giving up the most authentic and credible communication channel at your disposal. Governing the flow of UGC, stimulating, curating, and integrating it into your processes allows you to build a solid relationship of trust with your audience, gain qualified visibility on new generative search engines, and turn your customers into your brand’s most powerful ambassadors. Today, authenticity is no longer just a value, but a result that is built with strategy and vision.
Still have questions about how UGC works or how to integrate it into your strategy? Here are the answers to the most common questions, to clarify every aspect and get you started on the right foot.
- What does UGC mean?
UGC stands for User Generated Content. It refers to any type of content (text, photos, videos, reviews) created and shared spontaneously by people, rather than directly by a brand.
- What are the characteristics of User Generated Content?
There are three main characteristics of UGC: it must be public, i.e., shared on channels accessible to everyone; it must involve creative effort on the part of the user; and it must be created outside of professional practices, i.e., not by agencies or paid creators (unless we are talking about professional UGC creators). Its most important quality is authenticity, because it stems from a real experience.
- What are the different types of UGC?
There are many types of UGC. The most common include reviews and testimonials on e-commerce sites or dedicated platforms, photos and videos shared on social media (such as Instagram and TikTok), posts and comments on a brand’s social channels, comments on a company blog, and in-depth discussions on forums and communities such as Reddit and Quora.
- Who is a UGC Creator?
A UGC creator is a professional who creates authentic and spontaneous content on behalf of a brand. Unlike an influencer, their purpose is not to publish content on their own channels, but to provide it to the company for use on its own platforms (website, social media, advertising campaigns).
- How do you become a UGC creator?
To become a UGC creator, you need to focus on your creative skills, not the number of followers you have. The main steps are: develop storytelling and video editing skills for social media formats; build a portfolio with “speculative” work (created on your own initiative) to demonstrate your style; approach brands or sign up to freelance platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr to find your first collaborations.
- How much does a UGC Creator earn (and how much does it cost)?
Remuneration varies and depends on experience, content complexity, and the rights of use granted to the brand. On average, a single video can cost from around $50 for simple jobs to over $500 for more structured content with extended rights of use.
- What is the difference between a UGC creator and an influencer?
The key difference is the distribution channel. The influencer is paid to promote a product to their audience on their channels. The UGC creator is paid to produce content that the brand will use on its channels. The value of the influencer is their reach and the trust of their community; the value of the creator is their ability to produce authentic-looking, quality content.
- How can I legally use content created by my users?
To legally use organic UGC, you must always obtain the explicit consent of its creator. The best practice is to have a clear policy and ask for written permission before reusing photos, videos, or text, specifying where and how you intend to use them. This protects you from copyright issues.
- Where can UGC be found?
UGC can be found on almost every digital platform: on social media (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X), on video platforms (YouTube), on review sites (such as Trustpilot), on forums and communities (Reddit, Quora), and even on brand websites themselves (in blog comment sections or on product pages that host customer reviews and photos).
- How should I handle negative comments and reviews?
Negative feedback should be seen as an opportunity. The best strategy is to always respond publicly, transparently, and empathetically. Thank the user for their feedback, show that you understand the problem, and offer a solution if possible. Handling criticism correctly can turn a dissatisfied customer into a supporter and show everyone that your brand is reliable and customer-oriented.
- How do I set up a UGC-based campaign?
To set up an effective campaign, you need to: define a clear goal (such as increasing engagement or collecting content for ads); come up with a simple, creative concept that engages users; create a unique, memorable hashtag to aggregate content; offer a valid incentive for participation (visibility, prizes, discounts); and communicate the rules clearly, making participation as easy as possible.
- How much does a UGC-based campaign cost?
The cost varies greatly. An organic hashtag-based campaign can cost close to nothing if the incentive is simply visibility. A more structured campaign, such as a contest with significant prizes or involving the collaboration of professional UGC creators, will require a defined budget. In general, it remains one of the strategies with the highest ROI, as it is often cheaper than producing traditional photo or video shoots.
