User-generated content

User-generated content is anything your customers made about you. The photograph of the order when it arrived. The review. The video of somebody using the thing. You did not commission it and you did not pay for it, which is exactly why other people believe it.

In short

• Material about your business, made by customers rather than by you.
• Credible because it is visibly not advertising.
• The customer owns it. Permission is a message, and it is not optional.
• Collected slowly. Competitions produce volume and very little of use.

Why it outperforms your own photographs

Your product photography is better lit, better composed and less persuasive.

A studio image is understood as a claim made by the seller. A photograph of the same item on somebody’s kitchen table, slightly badly framed, is understood as evidence. None of this is measurable as brand awareness and all of it behaves like it. The reader is not judging the picture. They are judging whether a real person received the thing and was pleased enough to say so, and the imperfection is part of what makes the answer credible.

This is the same mechanism described under word of mouth, arriving in a form you can actually see and reuse. It is also why the instinct to tidy it up is a mistake. A customer photograph retouched to look like a catalogue shot has been converted back into a claim.

Getting hold of it

Most businesses have less of it than they could because they have never made it easy or given anybody a reason.

• Make the moment worth photographing. The unboxing, the finished job, the plated dish. Something has to be visually worth the trouble.
• Put your handle where people will see it. On the packaging, on the receipt, on the van. People cannot tag what they cannot recall.
• Ask at the right moment. A few days after delivery, once the thing has been used, not at the point of purchase.
• Reply to everything. This is the whole engine, and it is most of what engagement rate is actually measuring. Posts that get a reply produce more posts, and posts that vanish into silence do not.
• Ask for the specific thing you need. Vague requests produce nothing. Requests for a photograph of the item in the room it ended up in produce photographs of the item in rooms.

None of it moves quickly. A business that has been doing it for a year has an archive a competitor cannot buy, and an organic account that does not depend on inventing something daily.

Permission, and the mistake nearly everybody makes

Tagging you is not permission. The customer holds the copyright in their own photograph, and a mention on a public account is not a licence to put that photograph on your homepage or inside a paid advert.

The practical version is unglamorous and takes a minute. Send a message, say exactly where you want to use it, and keep the reply. Where you want to use it matters, because the three uses are genuinely different: sharing to your story for a day, placing it permanently on your website, and running it as advertising. Somebody who is delighted by the first can reasonably object to the third.

Meta provides a formal route for the related case, where a creator’s own post is run as an advert from their handle. It has been renamed at least once and is currently the partnership advert setup. That mechanism keeps the post attached to the person who made it rather than copying the file into your account, which is both cleaner and more convincing.

Where it stops being user-generated

The phrase has drifted, and the drift matters for anybody buying it.

There is now a category of paid creator who produces content designed to look like a customer made it, delivered to the brand to run as its own advertising. The work can be good and the label is misleading, because nothing about it was generated by a user. It is production, priced and briefed like production.

The line worth holding is about what the audience is being told. Material made by a genuine customer, unpaid, needs no declaration. Material made by somebody who received payment or free product is an endorsement. The disclosure expectations under influencer marketing apply to it, whatever the person is called.