There is a reason why Facebook recently added “Q&A” to their website. There is a reason why Twitter has built an entire business model off user generated tweets. UGC (User Generated Content) is powerful, and it does more than most will ever realize. There are people all over the world mindlessly plugging away writing blog entry after blog entry trying to generate traffic to their website.
Then there are those of us, myself included, thinking tirelessly about ways to get users to generate that content and traffic for free. Throughout my career I have learned one thing. Instead of working so hard at research, writing, and gathering data, why not put consumers to work for you?
With that in mind here are three reasons why your next website craves user generated content, and why it will succeed much easier (and faster) if you plan on incorporating it from the start.
Trending Topics
You can read and monitor tweet deck all you want, but nobody knows what’s trending faster than millions of people worldwide. Instead of actively trying to figure out what’s hot and what’s not, why not allow people to post trending topics in your niche?
For example a huge mobile sms scam hit the web a few months back, and luckily for me I have a website that targets scams just like that. Right as millions of sms messages were hitting cell phones worldwide, a user was generating a detailed description of the scam on one of my websites.
Guess what? As thousands searched for that scam in the days to come I already had the article. Thousands of hits in mere hours and I didn’t have to pay a dime for it. The research was free, the content was free, and the approach was completely passive on my part!
Free Content
Paying for content is overrated, just ask facebook. They have convinced the whole world to be their personal band of content writers, constantly writing and promoting the facebook brand worldwide. This is the benefit of creating a community and watching it grow.
Then they took it one step further, turning users into freelance photographers and videographers, uploading rich media content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Why would you pay for content writers when you can just find somebody’s emotional hot button and get them to write for you for free?
Call it whatever you want, but people are willing to contribute to something they are passionate about, just look at any message board or forum on the web.
Consumer Intelligence
This is the last reason, but is in my opinion the most powerful one of them all. What’s more valuable than content or revenue? It’s the ability to predict the next big thing to hit the web, and that comes from consumer intelligence. Learn what people need, and you have your next project.
Instead of trying to market your product to consumers, intelligence allows you to create your next product based on a need. You are basically guaranteed demand and revenue from the get go, anything after that is just a sweet bonus. People start businesses all the time hoping there is a need for them, why not gather the foresight ahead of time to all but bank on that next start up.
User generated content, much like trending topics, always assure that you are feeling the pulse of consumers. While the rest of the world is throwing darts at a board, you can bet on sure things.