How User-Generated Content Can Improve Engagement in Apps?

To boost retention and get larger organic traffic to your app, you will need user-generated content. User-generated content enables you to get creative with your eCommerce mobile app and reach out to a wider audience.

Do you remember how people had gone crazy for the personalized coke bottles? The “Share a Coke” campaign gained momentum soon after it was launched in the market. The company asked users to share their photos of enjoying their personalized coke drink on their social accounts. The results were amazing. The audience became advertisers. They started promoting the brand.

Before we discuss the importance of user-generated content, let’s understand its meaning.

What is User-Generated Content?

As the name suggests, user-generated content is the posts, reviews, and other content that your audience generates on digital platforms. The major difference between paid marketing and user-generated content is that the latter is created by fans and the general audience. These are not paid reviews. Basically, it refers to the act of getting your audience and fans to advertise your brand. The content can be in the form of a long blog post that reviews a brand, a basic review posted on the company’s website or online marketplace, a tweet, ratings on Yelp, comments on your social networking accounts, and more.

To customers, the experiences of other users with a particular product and services have always been an important factor for making a purchase decision. Before making an investment, they consider going through customer reviews to check the authenticity and reliability of the product. Product description, specifications, and applications only help users know how it works and how they can use it. But, to determine the quality of the product, they consider going over customers’ reviews.

The good news is that there are many ways you can use user-generated content to improve the eCommerce app UX. You can encourage your customers to share feedback on your product, give ratings, bring their friends to your page, check-in every day, and participate in events. In return, you can offer some coupons, vouchers, and other rewards.

Perks of User-Generated Content

Not all apps are based on user-generated content. But, you could still use it to improve the core app experience. Let’s take the Amazon reviews for example. Even though Amazon’s core shopping experience is based on personalized experiences and navigation, reviews still happen to be the core functionality that affects users’ buying decisions. Products with multiple positive reviews get more recognition than the ones with a few or zero reviews.

Another example is Yelp. Around 30% of users consider Yelp ratings and reviews to check the local businesses on their mobiles and desktop. They pay a visit to the brick and mortar store within one week. That is how effective social ratings are.

Authentic User-Generated Content

In 2016, Amazon took a big step and banned all sorts of paid and incentive reviews. Usually, retailers would offer a free product to the customers and expect a good review in return. Products that receive positive reviews happen to appear on the first page of Amazon’s search results. These products gain more impressions. Even one positive review on a product can multiply its sales. The only issue is that these reviews are biased. They are fake.

The main feature of user-generated content is authenticity. It needs to be a 100% accurate, authentic, and precise review. If companies start to generate fake reviews and biased ratings, then the UGC is going to be the same as marketing ads. User-generated content also acts like word-of-mouth marketing. Since these reviews, comments, blog posts, and other brand-promotional content is unbiased, they offer users an authentic opinion.