EGC vs UGC vs original social media content: what should your brand be creating?

Let’s take a look at three different social media content buckets (or content types) – employee-generated content (EGC), user-generated content (UGC) and original, brand-created content.

What are the pros and cons of each? The key to any successful social strategy is a mixture, but which buckets should you look at dipping into?

Employee-generated content (EGC)

EGC is exactly what you might imagine: content that’s been created and shared by employees, showcasing experiences and insights about the company. Brands like Curry’s and Sheerluxe have spearheaded its rise in recent years, honing in on their team as the face of their brand.

EGC is authentic and promotes storytelling through real life, relatable people. Maybe the real winner being how affordable it is in comparison to traditional influencer marketing. In some cases, it can actually be more impactful – shoppers find micro-employee influencers more relatable and genuine than influencers.

Not only are brands using employees to simply feature in their content, a few have stretched this further into distinct social strategies. John Lewis, for example, has built out a group of employee influencers from their in-store styling teams.

The real trick here is they own their own accounts and create their own content as an influencer would, bringing the personality and authenticity, with subtle branding and key product placement.

M&S are another great example, however they’ve focused on building a store strategy focused around team members having fun with trends in their local store. This content differs greatly from the main M&S TikTok channel ensuring audiences have distinct reasons to interact with and follow them all.

EGC isn’t just useful for engaging with your customers, but also for attracting new talent. Barclays have launched their Creator Club, with over 30 staff sharing insider information and career advice for the @LifeAtBarclays channels.

However, EGC is not without risk. Brands that rely heavily on this format of content – in particular, when one or two members of staff start to become the ‘face’ of the brand – may experience challenges should those staff leave. Unless you’re founder-led, it’s important to ensure your brand can stand on its own.

User-generated content (UGC)

UGC is any content that’s created and shared by users, rather than by the brand itself. It has been a cornerstone of social strategies for some time.

While UGC it’s still incredibly important, recent shifts in the social landscape have meant we need to be more strategic with repurposing UGC.

We’re all familiar with brands taking any content featured in (usage rights dependant – no one wants to get into hot water for taking content they don’t have permission to use!) and reposting it across their social channels.

However, with the rise of accounts built purely on resharing others content – think LadBible – social platforms including Instagram and TikTok made a move to prioritise original content in their algorithms and deprioritise those simply resharing it.

TikTok is now able to immediately flag content as unoriginal if it has been posted by another account already and remove its eligibility to be surfaced on the For You Page (which is pretty much certain doom for the success of that post).

And Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri has also confirmed that if the platform can detect a re-share of content that when it’s surfaced to the audience it will be replaced by the original piece in discovery spaces.

This is great news for creators and those making their own content but not such good news for UGC.

You may ask: what’s the point of UGC now if we can’t reshare it and reap the benefits? Well there’s still a lot of value in user generated content and a few ways to avoid being flagged as unoriginal!

The main benefit of UGC, whether it originates from larger influencers or customers, is trust. Word-of-mouth marketing will always carry incredible weight.

Plus it’s also still possible to reuse UGC, just with more strategic approach:

Ask the original creator to invite you as a collaborator on the post. This is the best way to not only avoid originality issues, but also benefit from the direct impact of the creators’ audience. This functionality has been available on Instagram for some time and is currently rolling out on TikTok.

Re-share on other platforms. Did they only post to Instagram? A re-share onto TikTok or YouTube Shorts will be viewed as your original content.

Get permissions to use the content in your social ads. Paid partnerships and spark ads allow for the utmost authenticity – the ad sits on the creators’ account.

Take a look at Made by Mitchell for an example of a robust UGC strategy – the beauty brand is taking TikTok by storm, leveraging creators to provide UGC and tying it into their ads strategy to drive users directly to their TikTok Shop.

Original, brand-created content

Original content for brands can be anything from branded graphics to professional shoot photography. However, we’re focusing on the need for social-first, lo-fi creative. In the wake of platform shifts, this type of original content has never been more important.

The major benefit of brand-created content is the level of control you have. You can focus on creative, engaging storytelling, pulling in all your key insights to build content that truly converts. For example, you can create content tailored specifically for TikTok SEO, or content to support paid ad objectives – all while looking like native social content.

We’ve done exactly that for Avora, an immersive cocktail experience. We utilised key insights from top performing creator content to build out an original content strategy. Our case study has all the juicy details and results. Spoiler – they’re good!

The proverb about not putting all your eggs in one basket certainly applies for choosing which type of content to create on social media. They all have advantages and drawbacks. But when created in tandem and tailored for each platform – when you dip into each bucket strategically – you can create a potent, powerful mix.

After a helping hand with your social media content creation? Maybe some consultancy is all you need? Or perhaps we can do all of the heavy lifting with a full social management service? Get in touch with our award-winning social team today.