If you’re reading this, you already know what user-generated content (UGC) is and that it has been a hot topic on different social media platforms for quite some time now.
But how do you effectively source UGC? That’s where UGC platforms and UGC software come in!
When handling any marketing strategy through any digital channel, especially when repurposing UGC, you must hop on board a UGC platform. This platform will help you find, gather, and reuse all the customer feedback you have collected to build trust in your brand. Integrating UGC platforms into broader marketing strategies can enhance brand engagement and drive conversions by promoting a more authentic connection with consumers.
FYI: You can embed user-generated content on your website automatically. Sign up now.
We asked marketing experts, CEOs, and company founders to share their experiences using UGC platforms to determine which are most helpful for marketers worldwide.
What is a user-generated content platform?
UGC platform is a set of online marketing tools used to collect, curate, and display authentic content created and published by customers of any business.
Essentially, a UGC platform can aggregate all photos, videos, reviews, ratings, and any other form of media and feedback customers leave on the internet.
This meaning of UGC platforms is defined as an official software category by G2.
Additionally, social media marketers use these platforms to run successful campaigns by engaging with UGC creators who create and distribute content on their social media channels by mentioning the brand or using a branded hashtag.
Comparision of UGC platforms with expert recommendations
From Hootsuite to EmbedSocial, here are answers to the question, “What are the best UGC platforms you’ve used to collect, analyze, and display UGC, and why?”. Ranging from UGC platforms for brands specializing in monitoring and collection of UGC.
1. EmbedSocial: The most complete UGC platform for brands
EmbedSocial is one of the complete online platforms used to empower brands to leverage UGC across different marketing channels. It seamlessly integrates with all major social media channels, enabling fast and easy UGC collection with just a few clicks. Plus, it provides tools to analyze and embed UGC on websites.
We use EmbedSocial to collect reviews from our tourism clients. It’s a breeze – we set up the form and add its link into follow-up emails from their booking engine. Then, linking the form to a review widget (another tool on their platform) makes it super easy to show off star ratings in Google SERP.
Lucas S, business owner
The platform provides two big functionalities such as reviews management and social media aggregation, as described below:
EmbedReveiews reviews management platform
Reviews management is a big part of the EmbedSocial UGC content platform. It is one of the best platforms for easily gathering user-generated content (UGC) in the form of online reviews and testimonials. It has a user-friendly interface and specializes in collecting reviews from social media such as Facebook and Google. It also offers different capabilities to collect reviews via Email, SMS, web forms, or direct upload.
The main features include automatic review generation from Google location, a Wall of Love page to display all reviews in one place, a views form to collect customer feedback on the website, Google reviews snippets, and much more.
Embed Google Reviews Widget
Automatically collect and embed Google reviews and use AI reviews management tools to unlock your website’s sales potential.
FYI: You can automatically embed Google reviews widget on your website and show authentic user-generated reviews, increasing trust for more sales. Try it now.
EmbedFeed Social media aggregator for multiple social media platforms
Another best-selling product within the EmbedSocial platform is its official API integrations with various social media platforms, which make it a social media management platform and social media aggregator. Its advanced social media aggregation helps brands collect content from their own social media accounts and accounts of others, such as UGC creators or actual customers. It integrates with multiple social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads and Facebook.
The main use case for users is the ability to pull UGC and social proof from a specified hashtag or videos and photos that people published by mentioning the user’s Instagram account.
EmbedSocial has approved integrations with all major social media aggregators that make it very powerful. It can sync content on users’ websites as soon as a customer publishes it on various social media channels, and the integrations allow thousands of content pieces such as Instagram mentions to be pulled seamlessly, which makes it a very stable platform for bigger brands and enterprises.
Finally, users can choose how they want to display the UGC on their websites by browsing a large Templates library that provides pre-built widgets that they can reuse and embed in just a few clicks.
2. Social Native (Olapic)
Social Native (formerly Olapic) is one of the top UGC platforms that collect and can curate user-generated content but also helps you discover influencers that best suit your business model (and social media strategy).
The platform is focused on collecting images and videos from Instagram and Twitter, and the method they use is through mentions and tags. The niches included are eCommerce brands, email marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, and more.
It has an AI-powered suggestion system that determines which content would best match a specific brand’s UGC marketing channels, making audience targeting an entirely automated and accurate process.
I’ve used several UGC platforms over the years, some of the more memorable experiences being Pixlee, Yotpo, and Olapic. They’ve all done a terrific job collecting, searching, and displaying UGC, with some of them even going as far as providing engagement options for interacting with customers. The reason I jumped from one to another was that none of them had a content suggestion system that worked well for my needs, at least until I encountered Olapic.
Experience by Damjan Tanaskovic, CMO of Localizely, who used this platform:
3. Yotpo
Yotpo provides eCommerce marketing solutions aimed at large Shopify stores to collect and display user-generated content at scale. Yotpo integrates seamlessly with major eCommerce platforms, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Its main focus is SMS requests, loyalty and referrals, reviews collection, and visual user-generated content.
After exploring a bit further, we found that this platform meets most of the requirements for bigger enterprises, such as enterprise-grade security, dedicated customer service, and consolidated billing.
4. Onstipe
Onstipe is a user-generated content platform that makes collecting UGC incredibly simple and efficient. Simply add your hashtag and leave the rest up to Onstipe to gather content. After gathering UGC, you can style it to match the colors of your website or the subject of your event.
For me, the most remarkable UGC aggregator and presentation system is Onstipe. It mixes user- and brand-generated content to market your brand across a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. You will receive fantastic curation and moderation tools that let you prevent the presentation of irrelevant information.
Recomendation shared Dayna Carlin, Director of Marketing and Sales, NovoPath
5. Crowdriff
Crowdriff combines UGC discovery with global travel and tourism. As they state in their mission, they want to make travel good both for people and the planet.
They collect visual UGC that would inspire travelers to see the world from a different perspective and explore sustainably. The platform is a real visual content engine that focuses on travel brands.
The platform includes data integration tools for import/export and reporting capabilities, so I can measure how my visuals perform and impact my overall business growth. These features make CrowdRiff a powerful UGC visual marketing platform for effectively collecting, analyzing, and displaying user-generated content.
What makes CrowdRiff truly stand out from other UGC platforms is that it also offers comprehensive visual curation tools to help me create meaningful visual stories out of UGC that shoppers love engaging with.
Shared by Benjamin Okyere, Data Engineer, Stress Reliever:
6. Upfluence
Upfluence is an all-in-one affiliate and influencer marketing platform that provides UGC, in addition to its many other offerings. I’ve used Upfluence, which allows you to collaborate with the appropriate influencers to create original content for your company, streamline your marketing initiatives, and increase revenue.
The platform’s ability to assist you in bringing on influencers and ensuring their dedication to your campaign is its best feature. You may develop long-lasting connections and produce more user-generated content (UGC) that gains the trust and loyalty of your audience by adhering to each stage of collaboration.
Daniel Foley Carter, Founder, Daniel Foley SEO
7. Instagram
Instagram is one of the most popular social media networks and many marketers use it to natively to engage with customers via DMs and manually collect UGC.
Here is the experience shared by Seth Newman, Director, SportingSmiles
We have a customer program where, if they take a selfie with our product and post it on Instagram, we’ll send them a free cleaning kit. As a company, we craft oral products such as whitening trays, retainers, and night guards, so taking a selfie with these products that show off their teeth is a natural fit.
We include instructions to tag our account in the selfie, and the results have been great. Our account has grown by 200 followers each month, which is a lot for a small business, and the natural reaction to the selfies is always positive: “Your teeth look so great!”, “How did they get so white!”, “I need a new retainer too!” This leads to curious potential buyers coming to our Instagram page before heading to our site. Instagram is the perfect place for a selfie, and the selfie works great with our brand, so the best UGC platform for us is Instagram.
8. Trustpilot
Another tool that’s great for UGC campaigns, Trustpilot, is a customer review management software that can be used in many niches such as banks, jewelry stores, travel insurance, energy supply, car dealerships, real estate, insurance, fitness, pet stores, and many more.
It is one of the most popular free customer review sites, with features such as review badges, a reviews page, consumer Intelligence, customer feedback, competitive intelligence, sentiment analysis, and corporate reporting.
They offer no free plans, but you can book a demo for all of the paid options.
9. Intellifluence
The end-to-end influencer marketing platform Intellifluence provides a respectable network of influencers, and I would say that it is targeted toward smaller firms. Although they don’t have the largest influencer network (there are roughly 200,000), every influencer joined of their own volition.
Whichever influencer you decide to collaborate with on your UGC campaign will therefore be willing, eager, and prepared.
According to my personal experience, Intellifluence excels at making it simple to generate and promote customized content. With Intellifluence’s Influencer Discovery tool, adding an influencer to your campaign is simple once you’ve built it.
Paul Somerville, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Scooter Guide
10. Bazaarvoice
From ratings and reviews, Q&As, social and visual content, and much more, Bazaarvoice is a great content curation tool that gives total user control for collecting, displaying, and distributing relatable content. The industries it covers are apparel and accessories, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, health, and beauty.
Bazaarvoice allows me to have a wide range of diverse customer feedback and insights that I can use to promote my brand. Bazaarvoice also allows me to analyze and moderate UGC to ensure it meets my brand guidelines and company policies. This enables me to maintain control over the content that is displayed on my website and social media channels, ensuring that it is appropriate and beneficial for my brand.
Michael McCarty, CEO, EDGE Fall Protection
11. Pixlee TurnTo
Pixlee TurnTo focuses mainly on commerce and not just any type but community-driven commerce. What differentiates it from the rest is that it’s the only unified platform for Social UGC, Influencer marketing, and ratings and reviews. The platform has fast and customizable UGC widgets that are asynchronous and don’t block the page from being loaded.
Their website has no pricing, but you can request a demo through their online forms.
12. SocialNewsDesk
On the social media listening side, SocialNewsDesk allows you to quickly search within a specified timeframe or date range across social networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit for relevant posts and comments according to keywords you decide on.
We use it to retrive both organic and paid campaigns from multiple sources at the same time, so you can track the performance of all your efforts in one place. Its “Listening” feature allows us to monitor brand mentions at scale.
Travis Lindemoen, Managing Director, nexus IT group
13. Stackla
With Stackla (acquired by Nosto), you can easily find, curate, and publish UGC in real time on your website, social media channels, and other digital properties.
One of the best features of Stackla is its powerful analytics capabilities. It provides detailed insights into the performance of your UGC, such as the reach, engagement, and sentiment of each post. This allows you to identify which content resonates with your audience and prioritize it accordingly.
We use Stackla’s analytics to track trends in UGC and adapt strategy accordingly. Stackla also has a wide range of integrations, making sharing UGC on various platforms easy. For example, you can integrate Stackla with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to easily post content on these social media networks, too.
Tristan Harris, Demand Generation Senior Marketing Manager, Thrive Agency.
14. Judge.me
As another great platform best suited for online stores, Judge.me is perfectly compatible with Shopify Online Store 2.0. You can use Judge.me to collect, share, and manage reviews on an e-commerce site. It is very intuitive and easy to use. Getting reviews from customers is easy because you can program and schedule review requests to be sent to customers automatically through the web, email, or SMS.
The customizable widget matches my online store’s design and displays reviews with text, photos, and videos. I can display reviews and star ratings on my product pages and a carousel of featured reviews on the home page.
Judge.me has many options that can cater to what I want with reviews. Curating reviews is easy because it can automatically publish after setting certain conditions to be met. We can reply to reviews publicly on the website or privately through email. Judge.me also detects spam reviews and inappropriate language to be dealt with accordingly.
Experience from Kevin Huang, Founder and CEO of Ambient Home US, using this platform:
15. Hootsuite
The most remarkable aspect of Hootsuite Insights is its ability to track conversations in multiple languages. With this feature, marketers can monitor public opinion on a product or service among both domestic and international audiences, allowing them to tailor their communications strategy accordingly.
Additionally, insights on user sentiment help give businesses valuable customer feedback, which they can use to improve their services and drive customer engagement. All these features make Hootsuite Insights the perfect platform for organizations that need to measure the success of their UGC campaigns.
The best user-generated content (UGC) platform I have ever used is Hootsuite. This comprehensive tool allows organizations to collect, sort, and analyze UGC from various sources, such as social media platforms or blogs, while also providing detailed graphical displays of the data.
Tasia Duske, CEO, Museum Hack
16. Greenfly
Greenfly is a platform that helps companies automate digital media collection, organization, and distribution. Its aim is to help brands gain the power of the most loyal brand advocates to increase social media reach and engagement and attract broader audiences.
Greenfy was shared as a UGC platform by Joe Flanagan, Founder of 90s Fashion World. Here are more details about his experience with Greenfy:
One of the main reasons I prefer Greenfly is its ability to allow me to collect and distribute UGC from brand advocates and influencers easily. The platform makes it easy for me to identify and engage with brand advocates and to give them the tools to create and share high-quality UGC on my behalf.
This can be a powerful way for me to expand my reach and tap into my advocates’ networks. Another advantage of Greenfly is its scalability. I can easily manage and track the performance of multiple UGC campaigns simultaneously across several channels and platforms.
Joe Flanagan, Founder of 90s Fashion World.
17. Disqus
Disqus is not a typical UGC platform, but it can be listed in this category mostly because it provides news and media brands with direct communication from their readers, who are able to submit their feedback, opinions, or topics for the articles that news brands share.
Disqus also provides various customizable features and settings, allowing users to easily customize their UGC experience to meet their individual needs best.
Here is an experience by a marketing expert:
Disqus provides an easy-to-use platform for managing user-generated content, allowing users to create posts and comment on existing posts. It also provides powerful tools for analyzing and filtering UGC, making finding the most relevant and meaningful content easier.
Brenton Thomas, CEO of Twibi Digital Marketing Agency
18. Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager allows you to easily collect user-generated content from different social networks in one centralized dashboard, giving you real-time insights about your campaigns. Additionally, it offers engagement capabilities such as survey functionality, which allows one to ask users targeted questions or collect feedback on their products. This helps brands better understand what their customers are really thinking and feeling.
What stands out most about Adobe Social is its usability metrics that summarize how many people have interacted with the shared content over time. This gives marketers a unique view of the success and value of their UGC campaigns.
Carly Hill, Operations Manager, VirtualHolidayParty.com
19. InboxQ
InboxQ enables users to submit questions and ideas to a static page or post through a wide range of social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. It has features such as topic tracking, hashtag tracking, sentiment analysis, real-time data visualization, and integrations with mail marketing software.
According to the marketers:
Its unique feature is that it includes an AI component, which allows for the detection of topics or trends before they become popular in order to accurately personalize answers and create maximum value for customers. This AI component helps maximize our customer engagement by providing them with relevant solutions faster than other platforms can offer.
Michael Alexis, CEO, tiny campfire
20. Pulsar
Pulsar has tools to collect UGC from various sources, including social media, surveys, and customer feedback. This allows businesses to gather valuable customer insights and data.
It also provides advanced analytics tools that can analyze UGC and provide insights into customer preferences, behavior, and sentiment. This allows businesses to make data-driven decisions and improve their marketing efforts.
Overall, Pulsar is a good choice for collecting, analyzing, and displaying UGC because it offers a comprehensive solution for businesses to gather valuable customer insights, improve their marketing efforts, and increase customer engagement.
Jason Moss, President and Co-Founder, Moss Technologies
UGC software main features
When considering which UGC platform to choose, there are several key components you need to consider- those depend on the type of UGC campaigns you want to run and the type of business you’re running that campaign for. Also some of the current users review and rate UGC tools by Ease of USe, Ease of Setup, Quality of Support and similar.
Furthermore, it is important to compare UGC platforms based on their key features, such as:
- Aggregation: what type of content it collects.
- Content and influencers discovery: identifying content that mentions your brand and finding the key influencers sharing that content.
- Content curation: collecting all that content around a certain area or topic of interest (hashtags, channels, keywords, etc.)
- Rights management: You should be able to request the rights to reuse the content created by the UGC creators who discuss your company.
- Display: it should be able to display the UGC on various channels like websites, email, events, print, etc.
- Influencer management should enable you to track verified content creators and connect with them if you want to launch an influencer marketing campaign.
- Analytics: You should be able to see insights into user engagement and how your whole campaign is performing.
- Shoppable widgets: This is one of the main features for e-commerce brands that want to reuse their UGC and sell more of their products with the help of existing customers.
Why use a user-generated content platform?
Generating and reusing content created by real people and customers can significantly impact your social media engagement effort, bring trust to your websites, and possibly increase revenues by more than 10%. A UGC tool can help generate and reuse this content efficiently. In summary, here is why you need a UGC platform:
- Get access to high-quality content. Customers share priceless information about your brands, and with the right tools, you can collect it in just a few clicks and reuse it for marketing purposes.
- Identify potential loyal customers. By using social media monitoring tools as part of your UGC suite, you will discover customers who talk about your brand in a way you were not able to before.
- Cut the manual process of asking for content rights. Discovering content about your brand on social media is time-consuming, and asking for permission to reuse this content is double the time. You can completely automate the content rights process.
- Showcase social proof. With automation to aggregate and display Instagram posts or Google reviews on your website, you can show proof from real customers that will influence other website visitors to make better purchasing decisions.
- Reach the target audience. UGC platforms can help you find and reach people who are talking about your brand. By doing this, you can find and work with a UGC creator targeting the same people as you.
The importance of UGC for businesses
UGC allows customers and brands to establish a personal and authentic connection.
How? Customers share their thoughts about a certain brand and its products, which, when seen by their followers, constitutes word-of-mouth marketing.
Increases click-through rates
Per the latest UGC statistics:
- When user-generated content is incorporated into email marketing, the click-through rates increase by 78%.
- Web conversions increase by 29% when user-generated content is included, and user-generated content-based ads see four times higher click-through rates.
Increases reach and engagement
When people see friends and family sharing positive experiences with a certain brand, they are more likely to buy from that brand themselves.
92% of consumers say that they trust people’s recommendations more than brands. Also, UGC posts on social media channels have a 28% higher engagement rate than branded content.
Increases sales numbers
Most importantly, UGC boosts sales and revenue numbers, which is the ultimate goal!
An astonishing 80% of consumers say they would buy from a brand that uses UGC.
Conclusion
Harnessing the power of UGC is a necessary addition to any marketing strategy nowadays since it enables brands to connect with their audience in a more authentic, personal way.
With the right UGC platform, you can increase your brand’s trustworthiness, reach, and engagement, thus building stronger relationships with your customers and skyrocketing your sales!
That’s why it’s very important to carefully explore all the options presented above and check everything they offer to find the right UGC platform for your business.
FYI: You can embed user-generated content on your website automatically. Sign up now.
FAQs about UGC platforms
What is UGC in social media?
In the context of social media, UGC refers to any form of content, such as images, videos, text, and audio, created and posted by unpaid users on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
How do you make money with UGC?
UGC creators have several avenues to monetize the content creation and distribution of UGC across the internet, including but not limited to selling products or services, promoting a certain brand, offering subscription-based models, participating in affiliate programs, etc.
Is TikTok a UGC platform?
Most definitely! TikTok allows users to create, upload, and share short-form videos, often accompanied by music, filters, and other effects, which brands can reuse for promotional purposes.
How much does UGC cost?
In most cases, UGC can be obtained free of charge since regular users are happy to be included in the marketing campaigns of their favorite brands. That said, to obtain one piece of UGC from popular influencers, brands would have to pay a certain asking price, typically starting at $150.