My Biggest Social Media Discovery From 2019

If you’re rethinking your content strategy for 2020, GOOD! Times they are, as-always-in-social-media, a-changin.

The content you’re posting now more than ever needs to be a two-way conversation with your followers. Consumers are searching deep for those personal connections with brands in 2020, so much so that they want to be in your feed.

During a recent 2019 content recap for one of my clients, we quickly realized that each time we posted a photo sent to us by others, it became a top performing post. The user-generated content we posted had exponentially higher impressions and reach numbers than our own content. Of course! If someone’s photo makes it to a brand’s feed - you better believe they’re telling their friends! It’s getting reposted to their story, their feed, their grandma’s feed, etc.

The three images outlined in yellow were taken by others and reposted to this brand’s feed, all ranking in the year’s top highest posts for social reach!

With this seemingly basic insight, we decided to make posting user-generated content a large part of our social content strategy for 2020. Yep. This year is the year of UGC!

Sprout Social has also named user generated content as one of the top social media trends for 2020. Seeing how well content performs when it’s created by your audience just highlights the need for brands to build connections with their audience through customer-centric content.

While reposting audience-made content builds brand relationships, it also encourages a constant stream of content from your followers - bonus! For example, brands like Coca-Cola use their #shareacoke hashtag to show their personalized labels for bottles - personalizing the product as well as giving incentive to show your Coke on social turned into a huge user-generated content campaign win. Zenni glasses use their #justgotmyzennis hashtag to showcase satisfied customers and show off their latest products.

“Modern consumers are happy to have brands tell them what to post. Encouraging user-generated content and customer photos is a brilliant move for engagement and for the sake of social proof. With so much competition in the social space, anything you can do to create customer-centric content is a plus.”

-Sprout Social

So here’s to 2020, the year of the #repost!

Having trouble coming up with a quippy, catchy hashtag campaign? Unsure of how to encourage and drive followers to create great content for you? Or, just curious how to read your own data and create a reactive strategy based on your own numbers? Let’s chat! I’m available for all things digital marketing consulting and social media strategy sessions!