168 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING TIPS to Get Your Company Sourcing and Sharing User-Generated Content 1. Question sharing habits. Determine 3. Look for themes. If you’re a company what types of visual content your fans that already sees a lot of compelling are sharing about your company and images or videos from your social com- what the volume looks like. You need to munity, then pay close attention to the pass the “give a darn” factor with your most common types of photo and videos fans in order to collect the best-quality and hashtags used. What visual story is user-generated content. If it’s not natu- being told about your company? Is it in ral for your fans to share visual content line with the visual story you want to about your company, you’ll face a higher be told? How does the image or video barrier to entry. Alternatively, user-gen- sentiment skew—positive, negative, or erated images or videos can work against neutral? Use these key learnings to shape a company if its products do not meet your strategy around this user behavior consumer expectations, so pay close to form a more fan-centric campaign. attention to sentiment before jumping 4. Identify the pros, cons, and potential for into a UGC campaign. hijacks. When considering a user-gen- 2. Reward behavior. If you need an extra erated content campaign, carefully boost to encourage consumers to share evaluate the pros, cons, and potential for user-generated content, you may want to hijacks. The pros need to align with key launch your campaign with a contest to business objections and spell out how the try and seed the behavior with your core user-generated content will add value to audience. Following the contest, share as your visual storytelling goals. The cons many compelling images, videos, and so would relate to things like barriers to on as possible to further encourage the entry, negative sentiments, costs to your behavior from your community. Going company, and the potential to take your forward, sprinkle in further contests, or campaign in a direction that you don’t surprise-and-delight rewards as a way to want it to go in. Though not overly com- thank your loyal fans for participating. mon, UGC hijacks can happen. As a result,