Features & Services

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User Generated Content Promotions: An Overview

User-Generated Content (UGC) promotions can incentivize your customers to start generating content for your digital presence.

UGC is authentic, often resonating better with consumers than brand-created content while saving marketers the cost of creating content.

Promotions such as sweepstakes and contests are many of the few ways you can encourage your users to create rich UGC such as product reviews, high-quality photos for your social media accounts, or videos.

We operate as a full-service promotion agency, with services that can cater to UGC, including:

  • Custom and PromoPick Template Campaigns.
  • Legal Administration and Compliance.
  • Prize Fulfillment and Winner Selection.
  • Cutting-edge Technology and Analytics.
  • Dedicated Product Managers.

UGC Campaigns generally require two hashtags – A branded one, and one that includes #Contest or #Sweepstakes. This helps the consumer identify and be made aware of that they are willingly participating in your promotion, and their content is subject to Official Rules

Browse the rest of this guide to learn more, or contact us today to discuss your campaign.

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Best Uses for User Generated Content

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Best Uses for User Generated Content

User-Generated Content (UGC) puts the conversation in your customers hands while bringing authenticity to your brand.

It’s important to display the content your audience produces; Photos, reviews, and videos your fans produce can help accomplish a wide range of goals for your business. Most importantly, UGC is a great way to lower the costs of producing high-quality content.

Consumers trust online reviews and endorsements from their connections more than ever, so it’s important to include UGC in your digital and social media marketing strategy.

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Our UGC Services: What’s Included

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Our UGC Services: What’s Included

We offer both custom and quick-to-launch solutions for developing your User-Generated Content contest or sweepstakes.

Our PromoPick solution is a quick-to-launch and cost-effective solution that features a standard package of administration services. In addition, a project manager will be assigned to your campaign to ensure every detail is taken care of.

In three steps, PromoPick can provide you with a quote for your UGC campaign:

  • Choose Your Promotion – UGC Content is a powerful asset to gather from your audience. Our UGC PromoPick templates include a gallery and the backend tools to manage content. We also offer templates for traditional sweepstakes giveaways and contests.

Need help choosing a campaign type?

  • Choose Your Layout – There are multiple templates that can be customized to your brand identity and capture leads and information seamlessly. Each template includes a welcoming landing page, a gallery, an entry/registration form, and a “thank you” screen to confirm entry.

Check our Interactive Demo Layouts to see how users will navigate through your sweepstakes.

  • Structure Your Prize Pool – Incentives are the core of your sweepstakes! Select a prize strategy or contact our expert team to help you optimize your return.

Our Custom campaigns offer the same core elements, with the flexibility of:

    • Accelerated Build Timeline Available
    • Completely Custom Page Layout & UX
    • Innovative Engaging Add-Ons
    • Customized Tracking & Advanced Reporting
    • Custom User Flow & Multi-Phase Content Hubs
    • Custom-Designed Interactive Games
    • Advanced API Integrations

Our sweepstakes and contest technology are safeguarded to ensure protection and screening against fraudulent or spam entries using a multi-point user and device check to ensure it’s a real human accessing the promotion page or micro-site to register.

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How Our UGC Technology Works

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How Our UGC Technology Works

Pulling Content from Social Media

Our platform is connected to social media network APIs to pull in photo and post content. In many cases, and especially for Instagram, we will access Instagram’s API on your behalf. When you partner with Realtime Media for an Instagram or Facebook promotion, we connect your business account to our platform.

This gives us a direct connection to users that are mentioning your brand using your handle and enables us to gather those posts and make sure the users meet the criteria you are asking them to take to participate in the promotion.

Once our platform filters all mentions of your brand or hashtag to those relevant to a promotion, they are pulled into our Admin Tool where you can sort and approve content that can be sent to a live gallery.

Accepting on-site Upload Content

Along with accepting entries from social media a digital promotion can also help accomplish data acquisition goals. When running a sweepstakes or contest, it’s a great way to boost every other part of your funnel on data capture. Running targeted ads on social that lead to a microsite with a gallery can increase your ad’s CTR (because of the chance to win a prize) and increase participation (because you are showcasing all the other great buzz going on).

When we build a promotion site with on-site upload, we find that it can help widen your audience and boost participation since participants may have a photo already on their phone they want to upload on the spot. In order to complete their upload, they also must register with their email address so they can be notified when their entry is approved to the gallery. This is a major win for first-party data acquisition.

Admin tool

Our Admin Tool allows you to browse, sort, and approve collected entries from social or on-site submission in one place. Approved entries are then sent to any number of galleries you’d like.

AI screening

Our Admin Tool can include varying degrees of our Artificial Intelligence (AI) screening. This feature gives you incredible speed and flexibility when sorting through photos submitted to your contest or sweepstakes. For example, if one of your judging criteria is to submit a photo of outdoor adventures, you can filter submitted photos to entries that the AI system has tagged as “outdoor” or “sky” which you can quickly mass-approve.

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Additional UGC Add-ons and Services

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Additional UGC Add-ons and Services

Our contests and sweepstakes can be layered with additional add-ons to drive your engagement further. These additional features can help create a cycle of engagement between you and your audience, or handle tasks such as winner drawing or content moderation. Our development team can create your promotion to any specifications. For User-Generated Content, we have addons including:

  • Photo screening – combines our AI screening and RTM will handle any exceptions that are marked unsure by AI
  • Contest moderation and judging – RTM will screen contest entries based on judging criteria you set on your Official Rules. For example, a photo submission contest being judged 60% on creativity and 40% on having your brand’s product in the photo. Or RTM can handle just preliminary screening
  • Public voting (with or without sweeps overlay) – drives extra engagement, lowers the barrier to entry for those not willing to submit a photo and drives email acquisition by capturing emails when people go to vote.
  • Custom landing page – customize the look and feel of your landing page, adding in support for extra content blocks that can feature prizes, other campaigns or products or brands you sell.