UGC content examples beyond video

The eight artefacts that arrive without a brief

Most of what qualifies as user-generated content was never ordered. It is text, mostly, written by somebody who bought the thing and had an opinion about it. It has no aspect ratio, no delivery date and no invoice, which is precisely why marketing teams undervalue it.

Eight kinds turn up again and again. Sort them by the doubt each one answers before deciding where any of it goes.

• The long reviewFour hundred words from somebody who used it for a month, with a complaint somewhere in the middle. The complaint is the reason the rest gets believed.
• Review photographsThe image attached to a review: overhead kitchen light, product on a worktop, nothing styled. A customer artefact rather than a briefed frame, and it reads differently for it.
• Tagged storiesA twenty-four hour mention, captured before it expires. Usually the fastest signal that a product has landed with a kind of buyer you were not targeting.
• Comment threadsThe replies under your own post, where a stranger asks whether it works on their situation and a second stranger answers. That answer outperforms your copy.
• Community write-upsLong posts in hobby forums weighing options in your category. Read them for the vocabulary buyers use. Do not quote a thread, a username or a specific post.
• Questions and answers on the pageBuyer asks, previous buyer answers. A ranked list of the objections blocking checkout, assembled by the people who had them.
• Support repliesA sentence in a ticket is often the clearest available description of the problem you solve. It needs written permission before it leaves the inbox.
• Forwarded recommendationsA message sent between friends and passed on to you by the sender. Remove names, ask first, and never reconstruct one that did not happen.

Nothing in the earned column can be brought forward by asking harder.

Earned artefacts next to a commissioned batch

Earned content is free and unreliable. Commissioned content is expensive and specifiable. Teams get into trouble by expecting one to behave like the other: waiting on reviews to answer a launch objection, or paying for volume that customers would have produced unprompted.

The reposting trap

A public post is not a licence. Platform terms let the platform host and distribute what people upload; they do not hand a brand the right to crop it, burn captions onto it and put media spend behind it. Permission granted in a comment reply is thin evidence, and it says nothing about the person's face or name.

Disclosure starts at the gift, not at the payment. A sample sent for nothing is still a commercial connection, so the original post has to say so somewhere a viewer actually sees, rather than in the last line of a caption, and that holds for a post you seeded months before deciding you wanted to reuse it. Enforcement sits with the FTC in the US; in the UK it is the ASA, with the CMA behind it.

The claim inside the text is your problem too. If a reviewer writes that your product cured something, enthusiasm does not make the sentence usable, because you are the one making the claim the moment it appears on your channel. Read all of this as background, not as legal advice, and have your own counsel sign the policy off once so the team stops relitigating it.

Six checks keep a repost from becoming a problem later.

1. Get it in writing somewhere retrievableA reply saying go ahead, inside a thread that later gets deleted, is not a record. Ask for one message that names the channels and the period.
2. Ask about everybody in frameThe poster is not the only person with a claim. A child, a friend, the staff behind a counter: each is a reason to stop and ask.
3. Listen to the audioA customer clip set to a chart track is fine on their account and not fine on yours. Replace the sound or leave the clip alone.
4. Separate organic from paidPermission to appear on your grid does not extend to a paid placement. Ask for both, or ask for the narrow one now and come back later.
5. Keep your own copyIf the poster deletes their version, your file and your written permission are the only proof you ever had it. Store both with a date.
6. Write the exit before you need itAnybody who asks to be taken down should be able to get it done with one email to one address. Decide who owns that inbox now.

Where each artefact belongs on a page, in an email, in an ad

Text proof and picture proof do different jobs in different places. The common error is stacking all of it into one testimonial block above the footer, where nobody scrolls.

On a product page, put the long review beside the objection it answers: the sizing paragraph next to the size chart, the durability paragraph next to the warranty. Review photographs belong in the gallery after your own shots rather than instead of them, because their job is showing the thing unlit. Questions and answers deserve a slot above the review list, since they are ordered by doubt instead of by date.

In email, one quoted sentence that names the sender's use case does more than a wall of stars. In advertising, text has to be legible at the size it will genuinely be viewed, which means one sentence, retyped at your own font size, with the platform interface cropped away and the permission on file. A comment thread works as an ad only when the question inside it is a question your buyer is also asking.

What our index will not do for earned content

Our index stores people, not posts. All 24,032 entries in it are creators you could commission, found by reading what they publish about their own work, and there is no mechanism for buying a place on the list. Nothing in it harvests or archives content that somebody has already posted.

One field is worth knowing about here. A portfolio link is recorded when a creator has one, and 32.1% do, which leaves 67.9% whose only visible body of work is the feed itself. For earned content there is no equivalent field anywhere, because the person who wrote your best review is a customer rather than a creator and our data has no idea they exist. Find them in your own reviews, your own inbox and your own comments, then decide whether the follow-up is worth commissioning.