“The Great Resignation” became a household term defining this employment shift. More people than ever have begun to question if their jobs, and careers, are worth the sacrifices they used to make without a second thought. Commutes, bad managers, lack of benefits, and other employee hardships are weighed against the opportunities the Great Resignation has created.

The increase in job openings has put the power into the employee’s hands. People are pickier about which company they choose to work with and how that impacts their lifestyle and mental health. They’re walking into job interviews expecting answers to questions like:

1. How does your company prioritize mental health for your employees?
2. What extra benefits do you offer employees to set them up for long-term success?
3. How realistic are your workloads and conditions?

And they don’t necessarily need the company to answer these questions for them.

Our 2022 State of User-Generated Content revealed that 52% of communications and HR teams regularly use employee-generated content (EGC), a form of user-generated content (UGC), across communications channels. They’re using UGC to show the talent pool that their company is the best option and the proof is in their employee sentiment. 

Just like when you’re marketing products and services, you don’t only want your brand to tell people how great you are. You also want your customers, or in this case, employees, to share their positive experiences, inspire each other to build a sense of pride,and attract more talented professionals just like them.

There’s only one way to do this—with employee-generated content.

What is Employee-Generated Content?

Employee-generated content is content, such as photos, videos, social media posts, or reviews, created by a current, former, or prospective employee about a brand or its company culture. EGC increases brand awareness, receives more engagement than brand-created content, and highlights the experience of working for your company. 

For example, a LinkedIn post with a photo of someone’s first day at your office is EGC. Or, EGC could be a GIF created from your team’s Zoom meeting. Here’s an example of employee-generated content that Alicia Raeburn posted when she proudly joined the Asana SEO content team.

The Great Resignation and increased job openings prove that people aren’t willing to settle in their jobs or careers like they were previously. Today, employee-generated content is more than a nice-to-have.

It’s a must-have. Here’s why.

Why is Employee-Generated Content so Important?

Employee-generated content is more important than ever because it sees 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x more engagement. Consumers trust content created by people more than brand-created content. With EGC, brands can build trust with customers and prospective employees.

Cisco uses employee-generated content campaigns that highlight the experience of working at Cisco and inspire prospective talent through unique stories from existing employees. Here’s what their Brand & Social Media Lead had to say about EGC:

“Employee-generated content is what has put the @WeAreCisco team on its path to success, with the metrics to prove its value.” 

Their campaign results highlight the power of focusing on employee-generated content moving forward:

In the 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report, we discovered 3 reasons why EGC is so important, based on the latest consumer trends.

#1: People want to form connections with brands and share their brand moments

Fifty percent of people surveyed wished that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. By sharing employee-generated content across marketing channels, brands show employees the type of content they’re looking to post. Their audience, fans, and customers can get inspiration and start creating content the brand can repurpose using TINT’s UGC Studio.

Condé Nast posted this EGC from an employee impressed by their lunch while visiting the office. This EGC shows Condé Nast’s Instagram audience the type of content they want to post, essentially giving their following a brand guideline that leads to getting their photos published to the Condé Nast Instagram account.

#2: Employee-generated content gets more engagement and followers on social media

People are 3x more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content over any other type of media they create. That number becomes supercharged when employees post content. Employee social profiles see 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x the engagement. More engagement cultivates brand relationships while driving brand awareness for recruitment and products.

#3: EGC is more trustworthy than brand created content

People trust user-generated content more than brand-created content—and the stats show it. With EGC, brands see more engagement and followers leading to increased brand awareness and stronger relationships with their audience, fans, and leads. Employee advocacy programs with at least 1,000 active participants can generate $1.9 million in advertising value and new job applicants consider current employees to be the most trustworthy when considering a potential employer.

Kristina shares her excitement to join The Bar Method team and have her first day in the books. In place of brand-created content from The Bar Method talking about how they train each of their instructors in a 6-month certification, this EGC post is more authentic showcasing a real person experiencing their program and loving the experience.

Employee-generated content clearly can have a major impact. But, what’s the right kind of EGC to collect and publish?

What Can Employee-Generated Content be Used For?

Employee-generated content, like user-generated content, has various use cases based on your company’s goals. For example, if you’re experiencing hypergrowth and looking for as much talent as possible—employee-generated content is part of your hiring strategy. But recruitment isn’t the only use case for EGC.

Here’s what companies use employee-generated content for.

Brand Advocacy:

Employees can advocate about the experience of working at your company, the quality of your products, and the integrity of your brand. Instead of your brand talking about how great you are—with EGC, your team acts as brand ambassadors sharing your work culture, products, and brand message with their friends, families, peers, and followers.

“EGC works well with social selling as it requires a high level of authenticity and trust, and employee-generated content provides that necessary confidence. EGC reduces costs and increases sales while creating more motivated and engaged employees.”

– Agnieszka Goulin, Head of People at Spacelift

Check out how Andrew Nusca, former Digital Editor of Fortune Magazine, advocates for how much he believes in the future of Morning Brew in these tweets that announce his new position as Executive Editor at the Millennial-focused media company.

Employee Engagement and Retention:

When employee-generated content is shared and celebrated around the office, it makes the team feel like a team. And when people feel like they’re on a team they’re more motivated. Even if they’re facing big challenges, the psychology behind knowing you’re doing it with others drives action. EGC on screens around the workplace, in LinkedIn updates from colleagues, or simply on a Slack channel reminds employees they’re part of a team with a mission and it inspires engagement and retention. In the age of the Great Resignation, if people feel disconnected from their team members or like they don’t have a shared goal—they’ll leave.

Akshay Kothari shares a new feature that his team at Notion was working on, and ensures his team members are tagged in the exciting news. This comradery around reaching goals is exactly what drives team engagement and retention.

Recruitment: 

Just like user-generated content outperforms brand-created content, when employees vouch for the positive experience of working at your company it speaks volumes in comparison to your recruitment promotions. Employees can act as recruiters connecting your company to an aligned talent pool.

“Focusing on content created by existing employees gives a real insight into your culture and what working at your organization will be like and acts as a great showcase for promoting you as a destination employer that people want to work for. At a time when recruitment is increasingly challenging, it is an excellent way to attract top talent to your brand.”

 – Wendy Makinson, HR Manager of Joloda Hydraroll

After working at Stir for a few weeks, Eli Badgio was already helping recruit new talent to the team by sharing this Twitter post.

Types of Employee-Generated Content

Employee-generated content takes many forms. It can be an exciting social media post from a new employee talking about how excited they are to work for your company or it could be an internal newsletter with company updates. 

Different types of employee-generated content include:

• Social media posts
• Reviews
• Articles
• Blog posts
• Photos
• Internal training videos
• Knowledge share programs
• Internal newsletters
• Bulletin boards
• Case studies
• Recruitment videos

For example, Dell Blue, a creative agency for Dell, shares a team video on their About page to showcase what it’s like to work at the agency and introduce their Dell Blue Crew. This video is great for recruitment to show company culture and attract talent to their team.

Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding, creates EGC of employee case studies. Here’s his suggestion:

 “Work with employees to create case studies about their roles and careers, or testimonials about their experience with the organization. The reason materials like these are so effective is that it shows readers ‘someone like you trusted us and had an experience like this.’ These materials can help you attract more candidates that are better qualified, as well as successfully hire and retain talent.”

Examples of Employee-Generated Content

Employees are happy to make content because they’re also looking to share their brand experiences online. When leadership buys into EGC and creates a safe environment where employees aren’t fearful of posting about their experiences, employees spread brand awareness, generate engagement, and help recruit talented team members. 

Google Canada hosted a Google Photo day with fun props to inspire employees to share EGC across their social channels.

Some more examples of employee-generated content would include:

• Tweets from employees about a work event they attended
• LinkedIn articles by company leadership explaining an emerging topic in their industry
• Instagram stories showing behind-the-scenes of a workday
• Reviews on Glassdoor that describe the interview process
• Photos submitted to a contest and shared on office signage or newsletters
• Social media comments talking about positive employee experiences at your company

Employee-generated content can reach every channel in your company (from internal to external!). And it should. EGC is meant to showcase brand advocacy, increase employee engagement, and help with recruitment—so the more EGC you can get the better. But where does all this employee-generated content come from? ANd how do you get more of it?

How Do You Get Employee-Generated Content?

If your employees aren’t creating EGC organically—it’s not because they don’t want to. Chances are, they’re not sure if they’re allowed to or what requirements their EGC needs to meet. Getting employees to create employee-generated content won’t come from a quick Slack message requesting it. It’s important to show what you’re looking for while not appearing too stringent on quality expectations.

Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman shows leadership buy-in to employee-generated content by simply retweeting employee-generated content from a new employee. His retweet also sets clear expectations of the kind of content he wants to see from his employees online making it easier for the Morning Brew team to know what to post.

Like Alex has figured out, you need to strategically get your employees on board to post EGC.

“Identify employees that are highly engaged and eager to share their experiences with the public to get started with employee-generated content. Give them guidance and pointers to assist them in producing the ideal content that is accurate and honest. Consider sending out a company-wide outreach inviting others to contribute if they desire to encourage more employees to participate. Allow them to choose a topic that truly resonates with them so that the content they create is an accurate expression of their true feelings,”

– David Bitton, co-founder and CMO at Doorloop

There are 4 ways to get employee-generated content:

1. Create a brand-specific hashtag (or multiple).

   No, hashtags aren’t dead. With hashtags, your employees can find other EGC, get inspiration for their posts, and feel comfortable hitting publish for the first time. To organize EGC and make it easier for your employees to find what they’re looking for, create multiple hashtags. For example, you could have a hashtag for marketing content and another for posts related to culture.

2. Set clear expectations of the kind of content you want to see.

   Publish and re-share UGC and EGC that you like. What you post is a direct signal to your employees as to the EGC you hope to get more of. Think of your feed as a Brand Guideline that’s exemplifying exactly what you’re looking for  in terms of content from your audience.

3. Show leadership buy-in.

   If leadership isn’t posting EGC, your employees will feel hesitant to push the publish button. Leadership has to show their buy-in to EGC by creating their own and engaging with their employee’s content internally and externally. Leadership buy-in sets the example and shows transparency and relatability of the brand’s leadership.

4. Host a contest.

   This is a great option to create EGC if some employees don’t want to post to their own social channels. With a contest, you can ask employees to send their photos, videos, and testimonials directly to your contest page. Organize it with TINT and easily republish relevant EGC across marketing channels.

The key to employee-generated content is not letting it sit idly on the sidelines. With your employee-generated content library filling up, it’s time to repost it across your internal and external marketing channels to get all the benefits. Here’s where it could go.

Where to Share Employee-Generated Content?

Once you have employee-generated content, you want to make sure it gets seen. Just like user-generated content, you want to have a place like TINT to collect it, organize it based on product, team, or event, and repurpose it for future marketing campaigns.

Jen Burns, social media manager at Cisco knows how challenging it can be to collect EGC:

“Maintaining an employee-generated content (EGC) repository can be difficult without the right platform in place to ensure proper permissions, tagging, and overall organization. With TINT, we don’t have to worry. We can quickly aggregate and leverage employee content to tell the story of what it’s like to work at Cisco.”

TINT has features like dynamic search, visual search, and object recognition to make it easy to organize UGC and EGC.

Once you receive employee-generated content from the various channels listed above, you can reshare it onto:

1. External emails
2. Internal emails
3. Digital signage
4. Brand social media accounts
5. Brand blogs
6. Ads or job postings
7. Events
8. Recruiting efforts
9. Job fairs
10. Career pages
11. Screens in the workplace

Employee-generated content is meant for sharing. Don’t let it get posted once and make its way down into the depths of the newsfeed. Collect all EGC and continue to use it for brand advocacy, engagement, and recruitment. You can even continue using the same content for years. By keeping your EGC organized, you can hop in and grab what you need depending on campaigns, recruitment, and company announcements.

That leads us to our next point. Now that you know what EGC is, where it comes from, and where you can share it, how can you actually use it? 

How to Include Employee-Generated Content In Your Marketing

As you know by now, employee-generated content is used for brand advocacy, employee engagement and retention, and recruitment. It can be shared on digital signage, emails, and a number of other channels. But how do you connect those two dots? How can you put it in action and use it seamlessly as part of your marketing or internal communications strategy?

If you’re stuck on how to use employee-generated content, here are a few ways to include it in your marketing:

1. Highlight employee knowledge. Choose a day of the week or month to dedicate to sharing content from an employee explaining something they have expertise in. This might be an internal knowledge share Zoom call, a LinkedIn article, or a video that they post to their own account and you re-share on the brand account. This can be used either for brand advocacy, boosting employee engagement, or helping with recruitment.
2. Replace the internal newsletter. Instead of asking for announcements via email and compiling them into a newsletter, create a space where employees can post their own announcements, funny videos, updates, and requests, and display them for the office to see. This might be on digital signage, like Condé Nast uses, or simply on a Slack channel. This can be used for employee engagement.
3. Broadcast your culture online. When employees share photos to your contests or with your brand hashtag, make sure to reshare them on your brand social media channels. If you have great reviews on Glassdoor, don’t be afraid to screenshot them and post them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or career pages, or quote them in job listings. This is a great way to show off your company culture and support your employees, and is great for engagement and recruitment.
4. Leverage your employees for amplification on LinkedIn. Let’s say your company launches a new podcast. You could simply post about the new podcast on brand channels, or you can add posts to something like Hootsuite Amplify, so that every employee can easily reshare the post onto their own social media accounts. This would increase your reach exponentially. TINT even has an integration with Hootsuite Amplify so that marketers can gain legal rights to employee social content and then in turn create Amplify posts directly within the TINT platform. This is great for brand advocacy.

Employee-generated content is everywhere these days. And the biggest companies in the world know it’s an integral part of their marketing strategy moving forward.

Employee-Generated Content Your Marketing Strategy 

People are creating user-generated content and employee-generated content every day. After decades of brand-created content, people want to relate to the customers, fans, audiences, and employees of brands that showcase their experience with a brand. This relationship to people-created content drives engagement, following, and conversions. While this is great for brand advocacy and recruitment, it’s just one side to employee-generated content.

During the era of The Great Resignation, EGC is more than just for advocacy and recruitment, but also for retention. When employees have options, it’s up to corporations to show people why their company is the best place to work. If they don’t create the comradery and collective mission, people will start looking elsewhere. 

Employee-generated content is shaping marketing as we know it. But, it’s only one of seven trends we discovered in our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report changing the marketing landscape.

You can read the other 6 trends shaping UGC and marketing here.

The post Guide to Employee-Generated Content: What Is It, Why You Need It, and How To Do It appeared first on TINT.

So, it’s no surprise that even more marketers plan to use UGC in their marketing strategy in 2022. But many brands count themselves out of UGC, thinking their audience and customers aren’t posting about their brand or it’s too large of an ask from their users. If only they knew the untapped potential they’re missing out on and the impact user-generated content can have.

If you aren’t yet sold on the significance of UGC, here are 4 concrete ways user-generated content impacts businesses in 2022.

What Are 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses?

As a little recap, user-generated content is a photo, video, testimonial, post, or comment your audience or customers create about your brand and products. It’s the happy unboxing video they share to their Instagram Story when their package arrives, the tweet that says they’re so excited to be accepted to their dream university, and the TikTok of their burrito order at Chipotle.

It is created every single day, as people (you included!) share your life online with your friends, family, and followers. Instead of letting that UGC float around aimlessly on the web, you can capture it and use it to market your products and services.

The best part? UGC has many tangible business impacts. It helps get more engagement than brand-created content, is more likely to get people to hit the buy button, saves time and resources, and increases the likelihood of more UGC so you can see even bigger and better results.

1. UGC Engages Your Audience
2. UGC Makes Consumers More Likely To Purchase
3. UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth
4. UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

#1: UGC Engages Your Audience

While your colleagues may not always agree that getting engagement should be a key objective, marketers know all too well the business impact that engagement has. It indicates if your content is resonating with your audience and whether or not it’s pushing them further down the funnel. It can also be an indicator of whether or not your audience trusts your content. As we discussed in How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI in 2022, the pathway from engagement to ROI usually includes trust, connection, and relatability. Those three elements can be the difference between an attention-grabbing ad that a consumer looks at but scrolls past, and a scroll-stopping ad that actually gets clicks.

In our 2022 State of User-Generated Content report, 60% of marketers said their audience engages more with user-generated content than brand-created content. Why? Perhaps it’s because their audience finds it more credible and trustworthy. 72% of consumers believe that reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products.

UGC is more trusted by consumers than brand-created content, which represents a huge potential for improving the sought-after engagement that brands want. So, how can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of high engagement? Here’s one way.

Get Your Audience to Engage by Making Them Feel Included By Your Brand

One way to engage your audience is to make them feel included, and one way to make them feel included is to showcase people that they relate to. People want to hear real stories from company leadership, happy users, and diverse voices to feel that they can connect with brands. Consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their own values and worldviews. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are incredibly important to today’s consumers.

Take Chipotle for example. Chipotle recently won a Shorty Industry Award for Best Overall TikTok Presence. Here’s the thing—their TikTok strategy is centered around sharing user-generated content. By making their audience feel included in their brand, by resharing customer TikTok’s to Chipotle’s account, they’ve garnered 1.7 million followers and 34.9 million likes on TikTok.

#2: UGC Makes Consumers More Likely to Purchase

Of course, the Key Performance Indicator that your leaders care most about is revenue. Engagement is great, and user-generated content is great, but does it actually bring in revenue and close sales? Thankfully, the research indicates “yes”!

When consumers engage with content they trust and find credible, they’re more likely to purchase:

• Consumers are actually 62% more likely to click on customer content rather than branded content.
• 76% percent of consumers have purchased a product because of someone else’s recommendation (even a stranger’s!).
• 77% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their shopping experience (which UGC does!).

People trust…people. When somebody they relate to, either through age, demographics, ethnicity, job title, etc. recommends a product or brand, that testimonial feels more believable than a brand-created commercial with the little words, “paid actor.” 

Consumers are looking for shopping experiences that signal that this product works for *them*. Personalized shopping is becoming a bigger part of the customer journey—and with UGC it doesn’t require complex CRMs.

Related article:

Social Commerce – The Definitive Guide to Selling More Online with Social

How can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of more purchases?

Personalize The Shopping Experience with UGC

Personalized shopping experiences don’t have to come with a stack of data about every single one of your prospects and customers. With UGC, you can personalize the shopping experience by showing your audience, prospects, and repeat customers how other customers have liked your products. Kora Organics links customer reviews to their product pages to create a personalized shopping experience.

With this review, an online shopper with ‘combination skin’ will know this product works for their skin type. That’s personalized shopping…without the need for an intricate CRM platform.

#3: UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth

Making your own content takes time, money, and team resources. Instead of planning a product shoot, spending tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) on deliverables, and spending weeks editing them for publishing—you can grab the content your customers are already creating. Better yet, this content gets more engagement and conversions than brand-created content!

With UGC, you’re saving the time it takes to plan, shoot, and edit your own content, 5+ figures of your budget, and giving your team more time to focus on their compounding to-do lists. From buying a new grill to seeing blue whales on a tour, UGC for your brand exists. It’s a matter of tracking down that content, organizing it, and repurposing it across your marketing channels as needed. How can your brand cash in on saving time and bandwidth?

Use Content From Contests to Fill Your Social Calendar

To get the ball rolling with UGC, launch a contest asking your audience and customers to take photos and videos for your products and brands (69% of consumers report that they have participated in a brand contest or giveaway). Be clear about what you’re looking for, tell them exactly how to submit their UGC, and add a prize to sweeten the deal. GoPro has been running social contests for years, asking their customers to share their photos and videos with hashtags and submissions to win money, gear, and exposure on their marketing channels.

Seventy-three percent of consumers agree they wish more brands would run contests or giveaways. With TINT’s Experience Builder, you can launch social contests and campaigns within minutes.

#4: UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

By now, we’ve learned that UGC increases engagement, makes consumers more likely to purchase, and opens up your team’s time, budget, and bandwidth for other projects. With more and more UGC, these results increase. Thankfully, UGC leads to more UGC.

Sixty-four percent of consumers agree when brands they like re-share content by customers, they are more likely to share content about the brand or its products. UGC is a flywheel—ask for UGC, post-UGC, get more UGC. We can see this from the rise of micro and nano-influencers, who will happily share their favorite products and brands with their small audiences (and even have higher conversion rates than mega and macro-influencers!).

Remember Nathan Apodaca, the micro-influencer who took a video of his commute to work on his skateboard drinking Ocean Spray? His video went on to garner 84.4 million views, get promoted by Ocean Spray, and spark a trend of replicated TikToks. There’s an influx of UGC as content creation has opened up to the masses and more people feel comfortable sharing their experiences with companies. By publishing moderated, on-brand UGC, you’re telling your audience exactly what you’re looking for—just like Ocean Spray did with Nathan’s TikTok (feeding into the viral trend of copying his video and adding a twist). How can your brand cash in on the untapped potential of more UGC?

Ask Your Audience and Customers For The UGC You Want

All user-generated content isn’t created equal. Some UGC comes with too many typos to reshare on your brand accounts or the lighting just doesn’t suit your Instagram feed. Show your audience and customers what UGC you consider “brand-worthy” by publishing the kind of photos and videos you’ll proudly put on your platforms. If you’re struggling to find brand-worthy UGC, tap into the power of TINT’s UGC Studio to do the hard work for you.

TINT helped TechCrunch’s Disrupt event marketers inspire UGC from their attendees through digital signage that shared their tweets on large screens. By showing attendees what other attendees were tweeting, TechCrunch showed their audience exactly what they were looking for from UGC that could make it on the big screens.

TINT’s Digital Signage also strategically promoted how people were tweeting about the event, inspiring TechCrunch’s Disrupt attendees to make their own UGC sharing their experience. 

How is User-Generated Content Impacting Businesses in 2022?

It has been impacting businesses for several years. The only difference between the past and present is the amount of UGC brands have available and how well aligned UGC is with consumer trends. Consumers are asking for:

1. Personalized shopping experiences
2. Deeper connections with brands that share their values
3. Testimonials from customers over brand-created content
4. Diversity, equity, and inclusion
5. Social media to spark their brand relationships

UGC is the perfect way to personalize the experience, deepen connections, share testimonials, embrace DEI, and spark relationships. Meanwhile, your business will be getting more engagement and purchases while freeing up your marketing team’s time, budget, and bandwidth. All the while, it will inspire even more UGC, creating a continuous cycle of positive business impact and a happy audience.

We covered these 5 consumer trends of 2022 and the 7 marketing themes that will impact every marketing strategy (from retail to digital) in our Annual State of User-Generated Content Report.

Download the report here to learn what’s on the marketing horizon for 2022.

The post 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses in 2022 appeared first on TINT.

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!

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