On the product side, we’ve introduced several groundbreaking features, such as enhanced social commerce and shoppable user-generated content (UGC), attention score for content optimization, and sentiment analysis. We’ve also expanded our integrations with key platforms including Salesforce, Canva, and Adobe Experience Manager. 

We’ve built upon our vast library of content resources with a special report covering UGC’s role in the return to travel, many new on-demand webinars, and a brand new podcast. Our Future of Marketing community grew to over 25,000, and we grew our partnerships with market leaders you know and love, like Hootsuite.

In order to accomplish all of this, we expanded the TINT team by 75% and received a few awards in the process, including San Antonio’s Best Places to Work. Keep reading as we look at the year in review for TINT!

Last Year’s Predictions

For starters, let’s take a look at how our predictions last year played out. At the beginning of each year, we publish The State of User Generated Content which includes original research, global survey results, and predictions on what marketing trends we’ll see develop throughout the year. In the 2021 State of UGC, we predicted that consumer expectations would push brands to connect with their audience in new ways, spanning both online and offline channels. As referenced by Forbes, Digiday, and HubSpot, one of our key findings in the report was that 93% of marketers believe that consumers trust content created by people more than content created by brands.In 2021, UGC provided a win-win solution for users and brands. Social media evolves at such rapid rates, making it more and more difficult for marketers to keep up with the increasing demands of content production – including video, new social platforms, and omnichannel experiences across all platforms. User and employee-generated content is critical for brands to alleviate the challenges that come with producing and distributing high-quality content while also being more trustworthy, authentic, and driving higher conversions. UGC will play an ever expanding role in effective marketing strategies into the new year. 

Looking forward to 2022, the metaverse is here – which offers new opportunities to combine, blend and merge physical and virtual realms together while shifting consumer behavior, marketers’ responsibilities, and expectations for a hybrid future. Learn more about what this means for marketing and see more predictions for the new year in the State of User-Generated Content 2022.

Setting the Tone for Social Commerce

eCommerce

While in-person retail shopping took a major hit in 2020, eCommerce skyrocketed. In 2021, the shift to social commerce continued where the full funnel buying experience from discovery to purchase is accelerated through shoppable social media posts. We expanded TINT eCommerce functionality to make it easier than ever to increase conversions and revenue with the power of UGC.

Attention Score

Another groundbreaking innovation is Attention Score. TINT Attention Score allows you to look behind the eyes of your users to visualize how content will be perceived before you publish. Attention Score vastly improves a wide range of applications for visual content, aiding in determining the right content for highly engaging social posts, optimizing paid ad campaigns, and converting site browsers into buyers.

Related: Want to know how people will perceive your content?

Sentiment Analysis

We also released Sentiment Analysis this year! Using proprietary artificial intelligence, TINT can now automatically detect, search, and filter UGC sentiment to find the best content.

Integrations Galore

TINT is designed to fit perfectly into your workflows. It should be easy to connect the platforms you need to grow. We continue to expand our leading integration ecosystem to help you leverage UGC across all your major systems and marketing channels.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

AEM is one of the latest additions to a number of TINT integrations, including Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Mailchimp. The TINT – AEM integration enables you to leverage user-generated content with click button simplicity so teams can easily push visual assets from TINT to AEM.

Salesforce

With TINT and Salesforce, brands can take their attention-grabbing UGC and use it in ads, emails, social media posts, and more. Connecting authentic content to products can simplify and shorten the path from discovery to purchase and drive personalization throughout marketing campaigns.

Canva

Our TINT – Canva integration allows you to bring more UGC into your visual content. Incorporating UGC within your curated graphics can be the key to ultimate optimization to maximize reach, engagement, and clicks. Enjoy the convenience and impact of accessing your own UGC and EGC to create stunning, high impact visuals.

Bynder

The TINT – Bynder direct integration makes UGC accessible with auto-captioned alt text and ensures that content is always available and easy to find for distribution across channels (webpages, email, ads, e-commerce, and more).

As we look ahead to 2022, we’re excited for many more powerful integrations to come!

Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism Make a Comeback with UGC

Travel, tourism, and hospitality made a roaring comeback in 2021. Now that more people are willing to travel, how can these brands stand out and inspire tourists? We partnered with travel research authority PhocusWire to release “Content Matters as Travel Recovers,” a deep dive into social behaviors and the types of content that inspire travel, comparing both pre-COVID and current trends.

This research stresses the importance of using authentic social media and marketing content to lay the groundwork for future success by building relationships and brand affinity with travelers and guests through UGC. 

Download: Content Matters as Travel Recovers: Influencing and Activating Travelers

A Year of Growth for TINT

It was also a year of internal growth for TINT. We grew and expanded our team by a total of 73% and had a retention rate of 90%! On top of that, we were thrilled to be named as one of this year’s Best Places to Work at our global headquarters in San Antonio. Each year, the San Antonio Business Journal curates this list based on employee rankings of key areas that measure a company’s culture. Looking for a “new year, new career” in 2022? We’re hiring!

A Community of Marketing Leaders 

Future Of Marketing podcast launch

We continued to expand our global marketing community and vast library of resources with a new podcast where we explore the perspectives of brand leaders to reveal their routines, inspirations, and insights shaping the future of marketing. Our Future of Marketing movement reaches an engaged community of over 25,000 marketing leaders around the world. Click here to join us and stay on top of marketing trends.

Growing brand partnerships

We’ve continued to expand our partnership with Hootsuite to provide the most value to our customers. In light of the shift toward social commerce, we teamed up with Hootsuite to create the guide “Get Started with Social Commerce: Three simple steps to start turning your social followers into customers.” We then joined forces with Hootsuite, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), and HeyDay for the webinar “3 Ways to Ramp Up Your Social Commerce Strategy.” In it, we cover how brands can use social media to remain competitive, build trust, and keep their audience engaged throughout the full sales funnel.

We also recently integrated TINT with Amplify, Hootsuite’s industry-leading employee advocacy platform. By activating employee-generated content (EGC), brands can expand their reach and generate more impact and engagement. Amplify makes it easy by giving brands a place to share the links, creative, and approved messaging that their employees can share on their own social media. With the integration, brands can now push content directly from the TINT platform onto Amplify.

“There’s so much opportunity when it comes to Employee Advocacy. It’s not just about leveraging your workforce as a source to push out your company’s content, but an opportunity for your employees to be brand champions, content creators, and internal influencers.”Brayden Cohen, Social Marketing and Employee Advocacy Team Lead at Hootsuite

Curious what an employee advocacy campaign looks like in action? Read how Securian Financial leverages UGC, EGC, and social to engage employees and customers alike. 

What’s Next?

It was a big year and still is – we’re closing out 2021 with a bang. We are proud to share that in December 2021, TINT was recognized in the G2 Winter 2022 Report as High Performer (Winter 2022), High Performer (Mid-Market), and Users Love Us, thanks to our great ratings and reviews on G2.

Thank you to all our customers, partners, employees, and community members who we get to learn from and work with on ground-breaking projects each year. We wish you the best in 2022. As you look at your own year in review, we hope that TINT played a key role in helping you grow, whether by building your marketing expertise with Future of Marketing, helping you hit your KPIs with TINT and TINT’s experts, or by having the best people to do business with at the Best Place to Work. We can’t wait to see what exciting things we’ll achieve together in 2022!

The post 2021 Year in Review for TINT: The Year of Integration and Innovation appeared first on TINT.

The perfect content creation tool doesn’t exist? Well, we beg to differ. At TINT, we know the importance of incorporating User-Generated Content (UGC) into different visuals. That’s why we integrated with Canva. 

In just a short time, Canva has become ‘THE’ online design and publishing tool with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Marketers love it, and the platform offers a wide array of features that allow you to create exciting visuals without extensive graphic design knowledge or experience. 

With it’s drag-and-drop interface, a whole realm of content possibilities opens by providing the ability to easily incorporate the best UGC and Employee-Generated Content (EGC) from TINT into Canva to create stunning graphics and visuals, all with the touch of a button.

Turn UGC Into Branded Visuals 

Every design needs visual content that is eye-catching and true to your brand’s standards. With the TINT-Canva integration, tap into the authentic voice of your customers and fans by easily uploading your best user-generated content directly from your TINT account into Canva to create stunning visuals sure to resonate with your audience. 

In this fast-paced digital world, attention-spans can be snapped away with the tap of a finger. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy in knowing which companies are using Stock photos and staged photo shoots, and which ones are authentic and transparent (UGC and EGC).

UGC is content that has been created, published and/or submitted by customers and fans of a brand. This is true word-of-mouth and the most effective way for brands to articulate the value of their products and services through real-human experiences to other humans. Combine UGC with an amazing kick-butt graphic design platform like Canva, and you have yourself a winning team for your brand. 

93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by people more than content created by brands. Learn more in our State of UGC report. With Canva you can design a wide array of visual content for paid and organic channels, and with TINT, you can incorporate trusted UGC!

Take Canva’s recent,  #CanvaDesignChallenge. The design challenge in particular is to create a fun visual using…Llamas! And, it just so happens that we have a desk llama (courtesy of the awesome people at Classy Llama) that would be a perfect contender for this contest. 

Using a pre-built template it was easy to create the visual above while incorporating our own UGC; The llama wearing a spiffy TINT bandana . 

Share your UGC Centric Design Back to TINT

Don’t waste time uploading and downloading files – our integration with Canva lets you finish the job all in one motion by allowing your UGC to be accessed in Canva, designed, polished and completed, and then shared back into your TINT account. 

Sharing back to TINT allows you to seamlessly use other content optimization features like Attention Score. Attention Score can help you discover deep insights on particular elements within your visual content to see what will grab attention and inspire action from your audience. Doing this will help you optimize the visual for better conversion-driving results. 

To start creating your own UGC Magic, connect the TINT app to your Canva account now. 

Don’t have a TINT account? Talk to a UGC expert now.

The post Now In Canva, Your Best UGC appeared first on TINT.

We continue to expand our partnership with Hootsuite and offer innovative solutions to the market by making it easier for users to leverage Employee-Generated Content (EGC) through Hootsuite Amplify. Amplify is Hootsuite’s industry-leading employee advocacy platform that provides a sophisticated approach to risk management for regulated organizations that necessitate pre-approved social content to ensure messaging remains accurate, clear, and on-brand.

With the TINT + Hootsuite Amplify integration, teams can leverage EGC in employee advocacy initiatives, and in turn, create Amplify posts by pushing directly from the TINT platform. This empowers companies to extend their social reach with EGC.

Why It Matters

Your employees are your organization’s biggest voice (think of them as brand advocates or internal influencers). Research shows that 33% of employees are already posting messages, pictures, or videos about their company without any encouragement from their company. EGC tells your brand’s story through the eyes of your employees and increases the exposure to new audiences through their followers. In our annual State of User-Generated Content Report, we found that messaging is reshared 24 times more when distributed by employees instead of brand accounts. Furthermore, that content also experiences 8 times the engagement of brand-shared content. EGC is not only paramount to engaging your team, but it also attracts top talent.  

Click here to learn more about Employee-Powered Marketing

TINT + Hootsuite Amplify Benefits: 

• Level up your employee advocacy strategy by diversifying your content mix with authentic and engaging EGC.
• Attract and retain top talent by highlighting EGC on social channels, career pages,  and internal displays.
• Improve employee sentiment by showing your team members that their voices matter.

Big brands, such as Pinterest and Chipotle, currently repurpose EGC onto their careers page to showcase what it’s like to work within the company. Chipotle harnesses the power of EGC further by encouraging employees to submit their content directly to corporate by using TINT’s Experience Builder, which is then used within various marketing channels, such as social media, campaigns, and in-store displays.

Interested in Learning More?

Use the TINT and Hootsuite Amplify integration to incorporate the powerful voice of your employees into your internal communications and recruiting and employment strategy. Contact our team today to learn how the TINT and Hootsuite Amplify integration can improve your current strategy.

Additional Resources:

• Case Study: How Cisco uses EGC to amplify culture narrative, engage employees, & attract new talent.
• Case Study: Securian Finacial Winning Brand Trust with a Perfectly Timed Campaign
• Access Hootsuite’s Employee Advocacy Toolkit

The post TINT Launches Integration with Hootsuite Amplify to Provide Better UGC & EGC appeared first on TINT.

In the digital economy, attention is the scarcest resource. Long are the days of gazing at your content, thinking it’s good, thinking that people will pay attention, but not actually knowing until it is published. There’s a new sheriff in this marketing town, a first-of-its-kind pre-planning content feature in our platform that allows you to look behind the eyes of your buyer to visualize how your content will be perceived before you publish. So, let’s all give a big warm welcome and find out all about this powerful new functionality in the TINT platform.

Visualize and observe Attention Scores BEFORE you post

Visual assets in your UGC Studio library can be scanned using our Eye Tracker technology where AI analyzes your visual content instantly to create a heat map, predictively highlighting areas that will catch the attention of the user.

The TINT Attention Score Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is built on extensive neuroscience research and trained on one of the industry’s largest eye-tracking databases to accurately predict behavior and visual attention which in turn influence the decision making and buying behaviors of your audience.

Ready to get started? Click here.

Gain a comprehensive understanding of why your content will or will not convert with Cognitive Demand and Clarity Scores

The makeup of visual content, placement of images, logos, and text can all influence the decision-making process through visual attention. Beyond the heat map, TINT Attention Score gives you an in-depth analysis of your content including cognitive load and clarity.

Let’s break down what Cognitive Demand and Clarity scores mean when analyzing your content for attention-grabbing details. 

Cognitive Demand scores the level of time and difficulty it takes the user to understand your content. A low score indicates that a user can process the content within a few seconds. This is good! The lower the better when it comes to cognitive demand. A high score means users will spend much more time processing the content. Hard to comprehend imagery can cause the viewer to ignore or simply scroll on without engaging, and we don’t want that!

Moving on to the Clarity score, this is based on how visible the key areas of your content are. If key areas of the content are hard to see, clarity for the user will be low. If multiple areas of the content draw attention in a clear way, the score will be higher. 

Talk to a TINT Customer Success Specialist 

Attention is a scarce resource and research has found that less than one third of ads get the full attention of an audience.  Visual content that gets attention is essential when it comes to strategically planning content campaigns, whether that be on a channel using an organic or paid approach.

Say you are planning a paid ad, set to launch on social media. You’ll want to be sure the content is achieving the expected engagement for a campaign within a set budget and goal. An ad that is not seen is worthless and even with ads that ARE seen, every second counts as the longer people looked at an ad, the bigger the effect on Return on Ad Spend and conversions.

The age-old method of choosing the “right” content is by relying heavily on benchmarking data, competitor research, and a little bit of Marketing gut and what “looks good”. But none of these can guarantee how the content will perform or resonate with the target audience, and before now there hasn’t been a way to gauge the attention grabbing potential of a particular piece of content. Sure, once a campaign is running we can change out images and rearrange text, but at the cost of budget, opportunity, and time wasted. 

The role of visual attention in the interaction between the environment and the mind and its influence on the consumer cannot be overstated. As you can already see, choosing the right visual content to publish across channels and campaigns is a daunting task, and to be realistic, sometimes scary. TINT’s Attention Score allows us marketers to be able to look behind the eyes of our user, learn what will grab attention, and use the instant results to test and optimize visual creative BEFORE publishing to maximize attention and drive the desired behaviors.

So how can you get access to TINT Attention Score?

Speak to one of our TINTtastic experts today!

The post Want to know how people will perceive your content? There’s a tool for that appeared first on TINT.

Now let’s take a look at what TINT has been up to!

TINTmix: now with Twitch and Facebook connections

Instead of choosing one platform over another, why not compile content from all? We continue to make our TINTmix boards more inclusive by adding connections with Twitch and Facebook Video. Simply create your board using our many layouts, and add the URL of the media you’d like shown. Take it one step further by picking the duration of the media to be played.

Oh…And did we mention that our Twitch connection is the first of it’s kind in the market?

Search and Filter Text Within Images

Advanced OCR allows for you to manually filter for images that contain text or search text within an image to easily filter for brand specific content or a particular keyword, and yet another way to quickly find the content that is right for you.

If you are interested in utilizing this feature, please speak to your TINTastic customer success rep! Don’t have TINT yet? Click here.

Pause Social Feeds instead of Removing

Say “bye bye” to removing feeds and “Hello” to our new pausing feature! Gone are the days of removing a feed to have all your collected content disappear. This new feature will allow TINT users to keep the content already collected and re-start at any time.

Cookie consent for Experience Builder

A feature request by one of our customers (you know who you are) that coincidentally made for a great upgrade to our overall user experience! The new cookie consent pop-up feature in our UGC experiences, social contests, and campaign creator platform, Experience Builder, will make it easier than ever to create experiences that are fully compliant with GDPR requirements.

For more information on these amazing updates and more, request a demo or speak with your customer success representative!

The post TINT Talk: July 2021 Product Updates appeared first on TINT.

Brands support the fans they’ve already won over by sharing, and repurposing their brand-centric content, while also using this social proof to advertise to other potential customers.

This article will talk about the importance of understanding and investing in User-Generated Content (UGC) as a way to engage organically with your brand, build brand recognition and receive the best ROI. We’ll also discuss how AI can help brands identify and amplify UGC for marketing campaigns.

The importance of user-generated content

UGC is a vote of confidence from your audience. It’s a powerful form of social proof and the next evolution of word-of-mouth. This is especially true in a modern era, during which more people are gaining a voice through social media platforms like Instagram.

Truly understanding how to leverage UGC can improve your marketing, while also strengthening your bond with consumers who already express satisfaction with your brand. UGC can also offer insights as a form of market and messaging research.

Unsurprisingly, consumers are tired of being constantly sold to, and respond better to reviews and other customer’s opinions from UGC-centric influencer marketing campaigns. One recent study shows that nearly half of millennials alike trust user testimonials over online advertisements.

Trust and credibility are key and long gone are the days of easy influence through a well-placed and thought out advertisement. Modern consumers demand social proof in the forms of visual content, reviews, testimonials and open discussions about your brand, but the key is your brand should have a hand in this. Consider this: ads that contain some form of UGC have a click through rate 4 times higher than branded content.

Brands that ignore UGC generally end up being plagued by negative or uninformed commentary about their product or service, which they then must remedy at a high cost. Embracing UGC from the beginning enables brands to have a say in the conversation, if not control it entirely.

With UCG, the feeling is that you are marketing with your customer demographic, not at them. By doing so, you are strengthening your connection with your customers and allowing them to play a role in determining your brand’s creative expression.

AI and UGC influencer marketing

The use of AI can optimize not just for time, but also expand and increase the positive effects of UGC content. AI gives brands the means to obtain and display more and higher-converting UGC at scale throughout the buyer journey. Personalization, engagement metrics, and machine learning have shaped the ways in which companies and consumers interact with content, and will continue to do so in the future.

The right AI can help guide and automate choices, taking the guesswork out of marketing. This can be applied to UGC, just as it is in other areas of business.

Most marketing teams today are relying heavily on AI-based remote collaboration tools that come with essential features such as the ability to share files and images, assign deadlines and easily communicate with remote teams online. AI can help guide decisions and cut down on the back-and-forth, especially when it comes to sorting and categorizing high volumes of content, targeting specific audiences with hyper-personalized content, and capturing the essence of visual content.

Ways that brands apply AI for UGC

There are several ways that top brands use the advanced AI found in the TINT platform to improve their UGC efforts.  One commonly seen approach is to use machine learning to analyze thousands or even millions of posts to provide a relevance and quality score. It can also help determine which quality content plays a key role in the decision-making process of whether to buy or not.

Another area this can be applied is in sourcing and sorting common questions through social listening. Once these questions have been gathered, brands can either work towards creating FAQS or otherwise incorporating answers to these commonly asked questions in their very first interactions with potential customers.

Amazon is a great example of this. They utilize AI to target customers who have already purchased a product, and send these customers emails to ask them if they can help answer a question another potential customer has asked. In a way, the Amazon approach takes UGC one step further by directly connecting a potential buyer with a past buyer, and letting the conversation organically flow from there.

This type of data can also be helpful to determine new uses or demand within unexpected customer demographics. This can help maximize marketing tactics. While it’s easy for a marketing team to get together and come up with a list of the most common questions and issues requiring troubleshooting for a product, it misses out on these aspects that can only come from your customers.

For example, the Magic Eraser by Mr. Clean was originally marketed for cleaning up marks on walls, such as the ones made by children with crayons. However, as years have gone by, more new uses for the product have cropped up. From using it to clean the vachetta leather off of Louis Vuitton handbags to keeping your designer sneakers a bright white, customers have enjoyed listing off the strangest usefulness they find in this common household product.

Wisely, the brand utilizes customer reviews (a form of UGC) on the website. This is a convenient and cost-effective strategy of reminding their visitors of all the different uses their product has.

Coronavirus and digitalization

The coronavirus pandemic has led people to buy more online, which in turn, raises the stakes for digital marketing. It has also uncovered undervalued opportunities in different demographics such as the baby boomer demographic as people who normally did not spend much time online are increasingly turning to their computer or smartphone.

Especially among seniors and those who were never comfortable completing tasks online, stay-at-home orders encouraged learning and adoption of new habits. This has resulted in a new wave of internet users who can be targeted through digital marketing and will likely engage with and trust the authenticity provided by UGC.

Other applications of AI are capable of utilizing a wide variety of behavioral data points from basic online activities, enabling brands with insights to create a more personalized experience based on the time users are online, what devices they use and what communication methods they prefer.

Email marketing is still an effective means of reaching out to customers, according to London-based online marketer Alex Williams of Hosting Data. You can use UGC to supercharge marketing emails by including customer testimonials, photos, reviews or questions as part of the overall message.

“Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective, with potentially massive returns on investment,” says Williams. “You have direct contact with your customers, with lots of flexibility in how you craft your message.”

Conclusion

UGC influencer marketing is an important pillar to your marketing strategy that will enhance your brand’s credibility and engagement among key demographics.

When the sincerity found in content created by real customers is married with the powerful scalability of machine learning to find, target and share the best UGC the results can be incredible.

Ready to learn more? Our experts are available for a no-obligation consultation to help you plan the best way to leverage the power of AI for UGC – request a demo.

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

The post UGC Influencer Marketing Sprinkled with AI – the Perfect Recipe For Growing Brands appeared first on TINT.

Seventy percent of consumers consider user-generated content reviews before making a purchasing decision. Lots of amazing reviews exist on IGTV just waiting to be repurposed across marketing channels.

How IGTV Aggregation Work?

IGTV content will now appear in TINT when accounts or specific hashtags are connected. This facilitates the process of finding great IGTV content to moderate, obtain legal rights, and publish and reuse on marketing channels.

The long-form nature of IGTV content helps brands showcase customer-created tutorials, demos, and walk-throughs of how they use their products and services.

Start posting audience and customer-created IGTV content for higher engagement and conversions by requesting a TINT demo here.

The post Feature Release: Aggregate IGTV content in TINT appeared first on TINT.

Marketing in 2020 didn’t come with a rule book. Yet, it showed how adaptable, savvy, and strong-minded we could be—even under pressures never felt before. Marketers took a challenging situation and figured out how to maneuver their way through it, meeting their customers in their new state and even taking social stands.

We’ve lived through marketing change, and the future is bright. Here’s what we learned, how we adapted and innovated, and what’s next.

What Changed in Marketing in 2020

Marketers taking on more responsibilities

Being a marketer means a lot more than getting leads. In 2020, we learned that marketers are the voice of the company—and that voice can make or break a brand during tumultuous times. The marketing role has become more important than ever, more than just creating brand campaigns. Brands need to be part of the conversation, whether that’s a pandemic or social injustice.

Marketers also need to be adaptable with things like content production, even without being able to organize product shoots and work in-person with their teams. This past year, where some hit the brakes on their content production, savvy brands had a trick up their sleeve.

As online content consumption doubled, brands leveraged user-generated content to continue their content output. With UGC, they didn’t need product shoots, models, or even an entire content team to help them put it together. The content created by their fans and customers is repurposed for the right marketing channels.

The role of User-Generated Content Specialist will need to be filled by experienced marketers who have tapped into UGC’s potential. These marketers will focus on incentivizing customers to create UGC and showing employees how they can make company-friendly EGC as well. As UGC continues to dominate engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty, this role will become more and more important in the future.

Rapid evolution and adoption of technology

Industries are evolving, either being created out of necessity or through new consumer behavior. A new wave of telecommunication has soared, as 20 times more participants used video conferencing within three months. Disney+ launched with the goal of acquiring 60-90 million customers by 2024 and they reached 73 million subscribers just one year after launching.

While many languished, certain industries grew faster than they could have predicted, and as the dust settles, certain businesses have hit consumer gold becoming a part of our daily routines. Nowhere is this more apparent than in platforms and technologies supporting work, connection, and communications. Companies have now figured out how to work from home effectively and they don’t see a huge rush to get back to the office.

Facebook announced they’d keep staff working remotely through June 2021, Salesforce is keeping employees remote until at least August 2021, and Shopify told employees to work from home indefinitely. For marketers, these trends mean that traditional methods of location-based outreach such as office phone numbers, IP address range targeting and tracking, direct mail, and regional events may continue to be challenging.

More online shopping, increased emphasis on trust

In 2019, Shopify hit a record for Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending with $2.9+ billion in worldwide sales. With 2020’s economic uncertainty, the question of how Black Friday and Cyber Monday would go was on every business’ mind. It turns out—it would go extremely well. Shopify hit a new record, $5.1 billion over the 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday holidays.

eCommerce, of course, was already on the rise and more consumers are purchasing online, but prefer to buy from trusted brands. As Mckinsey reports, people have a preference for brands they trust, and they’ll happily fill their online carts.

Social media more than just publishing

Sixty-nine percent of businesses surveyed by Hootsuite found that social media helped them prepare for COVID-19’s impact on business disruption by maintaining customer and audience relationships. While social media use was already increasing, COVID-19 accelerated the trends.

Marketers now use social media to understand where their customers are in the ever changing buying landscape, to adjust their tone, and further cultivate relationships with their audience as they humanize their brands through UGC and EGC.

Employee-generated content and employee advocacy provide a look behind the lens and brand messages are re-shared up to 24 times more when distributed by employees and get eight times more engagement than content shared by the brand. This year has strengthened the bond that social media can create between a brand and its consumers.

Adapting to Change

Adaptability has always been an essential requirement for success in marketing and in business. We’ve witnessed that brands can adapt faster by listening to their customers and earning the trust of their users. User-generated content is more important than ever because it helps brands show that they are in touch by highlighting the authentic voices of their audience.

Over the last year, we continued to innovate and evolve TINT’s leading enterprise UGC platform to provide marketers an infinite stream of high quality curated authentic content,  create hyper-personalized engaging experiences, and make it easier than ever to drive social commerce conversions with UGC. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Visual Search

This year we launched industry-first visual search UGC technology. In the world of social and UGC, there are massive volumes of content being created every day – and we give our customers the ability to search and uncover the perfect visually similar content every time. Visual Search is a testament to the power of the TINT AI backend by Filestack.

UGC Studio

We also launched UGC Studio to help marketers collect assets and build a library of UGC to customize and repurpose, streamlining social content workflows. Smart management makes it easy to store, organize, search, customize, edit and repurpose owned and earned content. Marketers also use UGC Studio in place of expensive and time-consuming design programs to make edits, crop, enhance, apply filters, and turn visual assets into ads for any social network at scale.

Virtual Events

Providing social walls and user engagement for conferences and events has always been a big part of who we are and by March it was clear that the world was changing. We released TINT Virtual Events just in time to help power virtual conferences, events, and graduations around the world with solutions to create immersive experiences designed with audience engagement in mind.

Future of Marketing

To connect with customers in what they are thinking, feeling, and experiencing will continue to be essential in the new year and UGC is at the core for driving higher engagement and conversions. Once a week on the Future of Marketing, we curate the most relevant trends, resources, and strategies in user-generated content for effective marketing – subscribe here.

At TINT, we’ve been behind-the-scenes with marketers and executives as they navigated the unknowns of 2020. There was a lot to learn and we got to watch as everyone listened and adapted goals—all while experiencing the first (and hopefully only) pandemic of our lifetimes. And, we’re grateful to have been able to help by powering UGC around the globe.

We believe that the most compelling story that a brand can tell, is one that the brands users, influencers, customers and employees tell. We pride ourselves as a platform that brands trust to tell this story of authenticity. We are very grateful to our customers, partners and our wonderful team.

Together, we’re pushing forward to a brighter future and we’re here to help you grow engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty with the power of UGC – schedule a demo here.

The post 2020 Marketing Year in Review appeared first on TINT.

Marketers using user-generated content (UGC) should remain calm and not panic. Let’s dig into what the Facebook Rights Management Tool means for UGC. 

The ideal user is larger creators, influencers, and publishers.

The ideal user of the Facebook Rights Management tool is larger creators and publishers, as clearly identified in their press release. The Rights Management tool is part of the creator studio which requires a Facebook Page, rather than a profile, to access. On the Instagram side, this also requires an Instagram business account. 

These prerequisites show that this is a tool for brands, including major influencers, that must manage and deploy content at scale. This is not designed for users who are casually sharing photos of their latest meal, hotel stay, or sporting event. 

This will likely clarify the line between macro-influencers and micro-influencers.

Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Nano-influencers, people with less than 10,000 followers, are consistently shown to have more clout and drive more engagement than the mega-influencers. These people are the tastemakers, community experts, and social butterflies that connect with their audiences on a deeply personal level.

This is likely (partially) in response to lawsuits about embedding

We’ve written about the potential perils of blind embedding before. 

Two high-visibility lawsuits were likely a major driver of this tool, and also possibly a reason it was released in such an early form.  

A 2016 lawsuit, settled in 2019, circled around a photo posted to Instagram by Justin Goldman. HIs photo of Tom Brady and Celtics General Manager Danny Ainge spread across social media before it was ultimately embedded into articles written by news outlets. Goldman filed a suit against almost a dozen media outlets claiming that his copyright had been infringed. The suit was settled out of court. 

More recently, in mid-2020, Deshaun Watson of the Houston Texans was sued for sharing three images to his Instagram without the photographer’s permission. The suit seeks punitive damages and will likely be in court for years. 

Cases like these are settled out of court for fear of establishing case law that could affect all future rulings around social media embedding and copyright. 

Reinforces the Importance of UGC Rights Management

The Facebook Rights Management tool doesn’t do away with UGC Rights Management but rather reinforces the case for it. The Facebook tool is designed to protect major creators and publishers, but that still leaves a gap for individuals who recreationally use social media. 

Many brands have seen the power of UGC to promote their products and give authenticity to their marketing. That authentic perspective is created by a genuine connection between a brand and its customers. 

Before using a user’s content, TINT always recommends a four-step process. 

1. Ask Permission
2. Document and Track Acceptance
3. Check for Copyright
4. Share the Love

Your customers care about their rights. Help protect them while scaling your content production. Repurposing UGC legally and safely is one of the most effective strategies for converting leads and driving engagement. Don’t slow down because of fear of Facebook Rights Management, GDPR, or CCPA. Learn how TINT helps the world’s top brands discover and obtain rights to beautiful authentic content created by real people.

The post What Facebook Rights Management Tool means for UGC appeared first on TINT.

Your best Stories deserve to live on! Instagram Stories normally disappear after 24 hours, but with TINT, your brand’s stories will continue to be displayed and accessible. You spend time and energy creating content, this is another way to get more mileage out of your Instagram content.  

TINT’s advanced moderation features let you select which stories to display, choose your best videos, and organize them into a beautiful tapestry of branded content. 

Now you can aggregate your brand’s Instagram Stories content and combine them with other content sources like TikTok and Twitter to create a collection of brand and user-generated content that showcases the authenticity of your organization. This type of social proof drives engagement and increases conversions across industries.

Instagram Stories content is available now for all current TINT customers. 

Ready to add Stories to your UGC? Schedule a demo of TINT today!

The post Feature Release: Aggregate Instagram Stories content in TINT appeared first on TINT.