In a recent article by Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration, she looked at the success of campaigns that included user-generated content. Interestingly, those campaigns which asked users to upload videos have far fewer entries than those using just images or text.

Her article also drew attention to the fact that users very rarely read the full terms and conditions for posting and sadly this often results in rejected posts. If you offer people the choice of video, text or images, video will get the lowest number of entries and this is more often than not due to the amount of effort required by users to prepare a posting.

According to Littleton, ten is the magic number. As a rule of thumb:

• 10% of people who look at the campaign will actively take part (post, like, upload etc).
• 10% of those people who take part (10% of the 10%) will abuse the system.

So how do you keep your campaigns simple? Here are a few considerations:

• Choose your media for entry carefully (text, image, video or a combination).
• Be clear about what is and what isn’t acceptable to post.
• Think carefully how and what you want people to submit.
• Check for permissions to use whatever is submitted.
• Choose prizes carefully - the best prizes are often things money can’t buy like to chance to feature in an episode of Corrie. Don’t forget to make prizes appropriate to your brand though!
• Choose your channel of engagement and ensure it’s appropriate, accessable and can be moderated to remove unwanted or spam content. Remember, people behave differently on facebook vs. youtube for example.
• No-one reads long Ts & Cs - keep them short and as clear as possible.

Finally, we’d love to hear your experiences of including user-generated content in your social media campaigns. And we would, of course, be delighted to tell you more about how we can help bring innovation to your digital programmes.