UGC media kit: what brands actually read

A media kit and a portfolio answer different questions

The portfolio answers whether you can shoot. The kit answers who sits on the other side of your camera and what a working relationship with you looks like. Handing over the wrong one is a common reason a promising thread goes quiet: a buyer who asked what a collaboration involves did not want to scroll fourteen reels to find out.

Content-only work often needs no kit whatsoever. If the footage will run from the brand's account rather than yours, your audience is not the thing being bought, and pages of reach figures read as a pitch for a product they are not shopping for. The kit earns its place the moment the deal touches your handle: a post, a story, an affiliate code, or ads served through your account.

Only around 6.8% of the profiles we keep are TikTok accounts and the remainder are Instagram, so an Instagram-only kit is the ordinary case rather than a hole in your offer. Write it as a fact and move on.

Keep them as three separate files. Merging them produces a document nobody reaches the end of.

Which numbers are worth printing when your audience is small

We never built an engagement column into our own data, because nothing about engagement can be confirmed from outside an account. A brand reading your kit has the same problem pointed the other way: they cannot verify a single figure you print, so a number only does work when you say what it measures and when you measured it.

Below a thousand followers you find 7,449 creators, 31% of everything we hold, so a small following is the normal condition of this market and not something to apologise for or paper over. Print the band and the date, never a projection.

1. Follower band per platformOne to five thousand on Instagram, under one thousand on TikTok, with the month attached. Exact counts age badly and invite arithmetic you will not enjoy.
2. Median views across your last ten postsMedian, not best. Say it covers the last ten posts and give the date, and resist screenshotting the single post that went unusually wide.
3. Saves and sends, where you have themFor product content these say more than likes, because a save means somebody intends to buy and a send means they wanted a friend to see it.
4. Audience shape rather than audience sizeTop two countries, the dominant age band, language, and the gender split. A brand that only ships inside Canada needs this line before any other.
5. How you actually workTurnaround in days, revision rounds included, whether raw clips are available, the filming setups you can do at home, and the product categories you have shipped.
6. What you declineAlcohol, gambling, your children on camera, anything needing a studio. Writing it down removes an entire class of wasted conversation.

One page, in the order a brand actually reads it

Someone opens the file, decides within seconds whether you are relevant, and only then starts reading properly. So the top has to answer relevant to what: who you are, which two product categories you shoot, which platforms you post to, the follower band, and where you can ship from. Everything else can wait for the scroll.

Then the work: three stills that each link to a piece, labelled with format and runtime. Then one block on how you work. Then either a starting figure or a line saying prices come with a scope. Then contact details as text. Then stop.

Hold it to one page and one file, small enough to email, named with your own name and the month. A file called media-kit-final-v3 belongs to nobody once it is in an inbox. Export a link version too, for the people who will not open attachments.

Design is not the point but legibility is. One typeface, generous white space, no gradient running under body text, and thumbnails big enough to read on a laptop at half screen. If a brand has to zoom in, the document failed at the only task it had.

Staying honest when the numbers are modest

Date every figure. A kit saying one to five thousand on Instagram, measured in early September, is more credible than a larger number with no date, and it stays usable for months without quietly inflating itself. We hold people in bands rather than pinned to one count for the same reason: a count is stale the week after you write it down.

Do not print anything you could not pull up on a screen share. When a brand asks to see the panel behind a view count, the answer needs to be here it is, not a story about a deleted post. The creators who drop out of consideration fastest are the ones whose kit and analytics disagree by an order of magnitude.

Leave out anything requiring explanation: reach from one freak post, a follower count that includes a bought spike, a rate computed across your single best week. One dated median beats four flattering peaks, because a brand is trying to predict your next post rather than admire your last one.

There is also a version of honesty that works in your favour, which is naming what you lack. No TikTok presence yet, or no paid usage sold before, tells a brand what to brief around. Better they hear it now than after the invoice.