Getting Started with UGC

This guide will walk you through the UGC part of the the Tradable Bits platform including when and how to set up a UGC campaign.

User-Generated Content

Collect, Display, Engage & Report

Welcome to the UGC hub of Tradable Bits. This is your tool to collect, sort, and showcase user-generated content from across social media networks. Display your best fan photos, videos and posts. Our cross-platform API integration will allow you to pull content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more.

The Why

Before we dig into how to use UGC, let’s take a look at the why. As marketers today, UGC and content from empowered creators continues to be a golden opportunity for fan engagement. After all, the best fan experiences are often tied to community. With this in mind, our UGC tool allows you to:

• View and store what your fans say about your brand or event → saving content for future fan-engagement use (i.e. sharing on socials, shoutouts to fans, etc.)

• Aggregate and analyze posts by mention, hashtag keyword & location, so you can stay on top of sentiment and trends

• Customize your UGC Display with pre-built templates to fit the needs of your audience & use-case

• Control your display with smart rules to moderate content, approvals & bans, and

• Find your top influencers and most active fans.

How to set up a new UGC Stream:

New Social Stream

Before you can start curating your own UGC walls and/or platforms, you need to configure a “Social Stream” - which is essentially one UGC “hub”. For example, if you have a specific sponsor for your fest, and want all UGC that mentions them to be in one place, you would create a “Sponsor X” stream for them.

Necessary Inputs

Social Stream Name: This is your UGC hub’s name, which helps you keep track of all your different UGC campaigns. For example, "TBits Life".

Social Stream Subdomain: This subdomain is added as an additional section to your main domain name. Use it to help brand and organize your navigation to your UGC page.

Note: Your subdomain cannot be changed after creation

Content Approval

Content Approval is the ability to approve, remove or delete content from your UGC stream. Choose between “manual” and “automatic”. If you select “Manual,” you will be required to manually approve content before it appears on your UGC stream. If you select “Automatic,” you are authorizing all content to be approved automatically.
Note: you can change this selection later!

Once you have filled out these inputs, click “Save Setup” to begin configuring your UGC stream.

Setting up your first UGC Campaign:

Now that you have saved your stream name, you will be able to access it under Engage Audience > UGC. Click into it to start configuring your UGC Stream Display.

Part 1: Sources

Definitions

Source: A source is what you are pulling in from within your networks. For example, if you are using your UGC campaign to listen for mentions of a campaign-specific hashtag (let’s say #summer21) you would specify the hashtag "summer21" as your 'source' across Instagram and Twitter.

Network: A network is where you are pulling your content from. For UGC campaigns, you can pull content from the following networks:

• Your Business Instagram

• Facebook Pages that you manage

• Twitter Pages

• Any RSS feed

Label
A label is a way for you to internally identify the posts collected. For example, if you are collecting all IG mentions of your page, you may want to label every post that mentions you with a “mentions” label. That way, your team can quickly identify the types of content you are pulling in for your UGC stream. A label is not required, but it is recommended. All labels should be lowercase only, and without spaces.

Sources Overview

The first thing you will see when you land on the "Sources" tab is an overview of "Sources Remaining" and "Posts Remaining." Use these quick takeaways to keep track of how many posts you have left until you reach your cap. You can delete and create sources as you'd like:

Sources Remaining : The amount of sources you have left in your account. If you have over 500 sources across UGC hubs in your account, you will be charged accordingly.

Posts Remaining: For each UGC hub, you can collect up to 10,000 posts. To collect over this amount, please speak to your partner specialist.

How to add a New Network

To collect social content, you will need to add the appropriate networks to pull from:

Facebook & Instagram
Authorize these networks by signing into the social accounts that you would like to pull from. This action is your “key” to the network that allows you to collect content, get follower stats and reply to posts.

Note: To pull in Instagram content, you must authorize through Facebook and have admin access to an Instagram business account that is properly linked to a Facebook page

X
Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you would like to connect an X account as a source. 

RSS feed
All you need to start collecting content from an RSS feed is the RSS address. Simply input the RSS address, click preview and then click “create source”

How to add a new “Source”

How to add a new Facebook/Instagram Source:

In the case of Facebook and Instagram, you can pull in content from sources that:

• Include a specific hashtag

• Is a post to your Facebook Page

• You have posted to your Business Instagram Page

• @mentions your Instagram handle

 

How to add a new RSS Source
In the case of RSS Feeds your source is the RSS address. As soon as you add the RSS address, you will automatically pull in the content associated with it.

Part 2: Stream Displays

Customize your UGC Display with pre-built templates

Stream Display Overview

The first thing you will see when you land on the "Stream Displays" tab is an overview of "Posts Collected," and "Posts Approved," and "Recent Views". Use these quick takeaways to keep track of the 'performance' of your UGC stream.

How to Add a Stream Display

Once you understand what type of social content you want to collect, personalize your display to the needs of your audience and use-case using our pre-built templates. From the left side menu, navigate to UGC Displays then click the + New Display button to begin. 

Display Types:
There are over a dozen "display templates" to choose from, that will allow you to quickly customize the appearance and format of your UGC stream. Choose the template that best represents your brand and use case:

• Our most popular display type is the "standalone" for ease of use and sharing.

• The tiled view, single post & slider are the most popular choices for live events streaming on big screens.

Once you have selected a display type, you will be prompted to customize its appearance, where you can set:

• Display Name

• Display Header

• Post Type (Text & Image or Image Only)

• Visual Theme (Rounded Corners, Horizontal, etc.)

• Refresh Rate

• Label(s) you would like to show

• Theme Customization (font colours and background styling0

• Custom CSS & Javascript

Save your Setup, and then you can view what your UGC stream will look like.

Part 3: Setup

Now that you have your sources and stream display type up and running, you can hone in on specific features around moderation, tagging, rules and labels within the "Setup" tab.

Settings

Set your moderation settings, and tag fans for future segmentation

Stream Info

This section shows you a quick overview of your UGC stream, including name and storage. Each stream allows you to collect up to 10,000 posts before older posts are deleted. If you would like to upgrade your storage for one of your UGC streams, please contact your partner specialist.

Moderation Settings

This section is where you can decide on how posts get approved before they are uploaded to your stream, and how you'd like to filter profanity.

Trust Settings

1. Manual-Approve Content: Only approve content that is manually verified and approved by a member of your team. This option is great for UGC campaigns where you have a very specific use case and curation is needed. No content will appear on your UGC stream until it is manually approved with a simple "checkmark" in the Content > Post section of UGC.

2. Auto-Approve Content: Approve all content automatically. If you choose this option, we recommend toggling on our filter for profanity, and setting rules for approved posts, which we will address in the next section: Rules.

 

Filter Profanity
If you'd like to limit any common profanities or offensive words, toggle this on. Our system will detect offensive language and then automatically remove it from your UGC stream. We still recommend monitoring your stream for any "context-dependent" trolls.

 

Collect Retweets from X
If you'd like to collect and display retweets, toggle this on. 

Note: Collecting re-posts often creates several identical posts in your UGC stream. Use this feature for specific use cases, such as measuring sentiment, or to rally your fans behind a cause.

Automatically Tag Fans

Use this section to apply tags to any fans who publish posts collected by your UGC stream for later segmentation and activation. As we love to say, "data is only useful if it's readable and actionable." If you aim to follow up your UGC campaign with targeted marketing comms, or an invitation to participate in another campaign/event, ensure that you are tagging all participating fans with proper naming conventions. For some inspiration, read our guide "How to Tag your way to Targeting Victory". To create a new tag to choose from, visit FanCRM>Setup>Tags. Choose your tag from the dropdown menu.

Rules

Use this section to apply rules for collecting, removing or deleting content from your UGC stream

UGC Stream Rules operates from the boolean logic "AND" "OR" to help you create inclusive or exclusive rule filters. As a quick explanation, the following two images explain how "AND" "OR" logic works:

Use this logic to create automated rules of approval, removal or deletion. You can create specific rules (i.e. whether to include a post or not) based on filters. Filter types include:

• Hashtags - include all hashtags you would like to include or exclude

• Location - search for a location and radius that will affect your rule. You can include one location at a time (i.e. you can choose to approve posts only from Vancouver, BC.)

• Users - include all usernames you would like to include or exclude. You can include multiple usernames, but only from one network at a time. (i.e. you can ban the user @troll420 from any Twitter post pulls)

• Keywords - include all keywords that you would like to include or exclude

• Date Range - include or exclude posts from a specific period of time

• Network - include or exclude posts from a specified Network (i.e. remove all posts that are from Facebook)

• Media Type - include or exclude a specific media type (images, text, videos), You can only include one media type at a time.

• Regular Expression - use regular expression to query something more specific to include or exclude.

• Granted Permission - choose this filter type to only approve or remove posts that have been explicitly granted permission from your team.

• Reach Count - include or exclude posts that have reached a minimum amount of users (for example, only include posts that have reached 1M + viewers)

Rule Types

Rules that Remove : Select this rule type if you would like to create rules that automatically remove certain content from your UGC stream.

Rules that Approve : Select this rule type if you would like to create rules that automatically approve content to be added to your UGC stream.

Rules that Delete : Select this rule type if you would like to create rules that automatically delete content from your UGC stream.

How to Create a Rule

1. To start, click down on the arrow and choose "+OR(New Rule). All Rules will begin with an "OR" clause.
2. Decide whether you will remove/approve/delete a post if it includes or does not include the filter you choose.
3. Choose your filter type, and click save.
4. To make your rule more specific, add a "+AND" clause to it

Filters for Labels
Using this section, you can drill down on your labels a little bit more, and add rules to better define the type of content these posts are pulling in. For example, if you want to only show Twitter posts that include certain keywords, you can choose the label you have created for all of the Tweets you are pulling, and add an additional rule to it.

You can also un-label all posts within this section.

Labels

Within this section of UGC, you can manage all of your existing labels, monitor how many posts are tied to each label, create new labels and export labels to outside stakeholders.

Create a New Label

Click "+New Label" to start.

Label Key - mandatory. Use this as your "label title" to keep track of all your labels internally. Please Note: Your label key must be all lowercase, and no spaces

Description - use this field to keep an internal description of what your label is collecting.

SKU - an SKU is an alphanumeric code assigned to your label that will allow you to keep track of it.

Quick Labels - use quick labels to assign a color to your favorite labels & speed up your moderation. You can choose up to three labels.

Call-to-Action Link - create a CTA button for all posts under this label that will lead to a product listing, landing page or another piece of content. Define a display title and the URL for your button.

You can also edit any existing labels by clicking on the "edit" pencil.

Merge Fields

Use this feature to merge the content, collection and rules from 2 or more labels. The source label will be the one that you are taking the content and rules from. The target label will be where all content & rules are combined (i.e. the one that will exist at the end of this process). Merging labels will delete the previous label in the name of creating a new aggregate label. All available labels are visible in the drop-down menu.

Creating Labels with SKU Imports

This feature is for use with the shoppable UGC stream display. Shoppable streams allow you to display UGC while linking fans back to products directly on your sight. SKU label imports is your way to link multiple products all at once with a CSV file. To see the structure of the CSV file necessary for import, you can download the sample file in the section. Essentially, you will need to input 4 column headers: the label name, your SKU, a URL to your product page, and a title for your URL (aka your call to action text).

Counters Setup

An easy way to keep track of posts collected & the number of times a branded hashtag has been mentioned. To create a new counter, simply click on the "+New Counter," input the hashtag you want to track, select your network and click save. You can now track how many times your fans have used this hashtag on that network.

Global CSS/JS

Use this section to input any CSS or Javascript for your UGC stream.

Part 4: Content

Posts

A dashboard of all the posts collected by your stream that you can approve or hide.

You can approve posts by clicking the checkmark on each post. If you want to hide a post from your UGC stream, click the "x" button.

If you created rules to automatically approve or remove posts, you will see a number next to the label icon on that post. This number represents the number of labels that the post has. You can also manually add labels to each post by clicking on the label icon, then selecting the label you would like.

To see more information about each post, click the three dots button. This will pull up a few more items for extra tools:

• Verify a specific author - will approve all their past and future posts).

• Ban an author (useful for quickly getting rid of trolls). This will permanently delete past & future posts by that author.

• View Post Details - this will allow you to view and edit the post's metadata. You can also change the post's caption, but we advise you do this with caution.

• See Original Post - Link back to the original post on the author's social channel

• Follow Author - follow the author's social channel

• Mark as Permanent - make sure that the post will stay on your UGC stream

• Pin - pin the content to your first page

Another feature that is useful on the post page is the search bar. Use this feature to search through posts.

Newer Posts & "Mark as Seen": These two buttons are features to help you moderate faster without duplicating work if you have multiple people moderating your stream. The moderator simply clicks "Newer posts," moderates to the bottom of the page, and once finished, clicks "mark as seen and refresh". This will ensure that any posts "marked as seen" will not be visible to any other moderator.

Authors

Manage roles and permissions for your authors.

What's in an Author? : In the context of UGC streams, authors are users whose posts have been collected into your stream.

Use this section to verify authors, ban authors, and monitor trolls.

Please Note: This section is used to monitor authors with defined roles. Not all authors will be visible on this page. If you have a particular author that you would like to track, add them as a new author".

Custom Posts:

Use HTML to code your own custom post to feature in your stream

Use Cases:

• You want specific posts to stand out through the use of custom designs

• You don’t want to upload your own post to any form of social media, and instead want to upload it directly to your UGC stream

• You have UGC stream sponsors and want to customize how their ad/post looks

You can also apply custom CSS to a specific label. In this case, the custom CSS would apply to any post that is pulled into your UGC stream from normal social media channels that have that label.

Export

Download and share all post information that you have collected from your UGC stream

Please Note: Due to privacy regulations, you can only export posts that are uploaded directly to your UGC stream. Downloading posts from native social networks breaches their privacy rules.

Use this section to export posts, and drill down based on criteria such as labels and post type. You can customize the order of how your posts are displayed, and can also rearrange the way you’d like the columns to appear on your spreadsheet. Image download will only work for posts that meet the social network’s privacy criteria (i.e. posts uploaded directly to your UGC stream).

If you’d like to reward a random fan for their upload to your UGC stream, choose “Random” from the results order dropdown. This will randomize the order in which your fans appear on the export spreadsheet, allowing you to choose the “1st place winner” randomly.

Part 5: Stats

Stats

Drill down on your UGC results

The stats overview section is your place to get a quick overview of:

• total posts pulled/uploaded to your UGC stream,

• number of reported posts, and approved posts,

• stored posts [posts that haven’t been deleted], authors and views

• visual graph of posts by date (either by posts stored, or posts collected)

• reach

• demographic breakdown of authors (gender and top locations)

• posts/authors by network

• most popular hashtags

• most influential author on Twitter

• the trending posts from your UGC stream

Use the date range at the top of the page to specify a time period, or label that you would like to analyze. You can then share a link to your UGC stats using the “Share report” button, or print the page of stats using “print”.

Counters

Your daily update of hashtag mentions

Counters are an easy way to track how many times your branded hashtags are mentioned on different platforms. This section tracks the hashtags that you have previously set up under setup> counters setup and gives you a day-by-day breakdown of mentions and reach.

Followers

Analyze the followers for your properties and statistics around their growth.

Please Note: To use this section effectively, make sure that you are using your brand’s official social media channels.

This section allows you to get a quick overview of your follower growth for your authorized social channels, including a day-by-day breakdown of growth.

You can also use this section to understand how many authors on your stream are following you, and how many of your followers are posting to your UGC stream. If you notice that a large percentage of your followers are not posting to your UGC stream, you may want to re-promote and re-engage them across your social channels.

 

That’s it! You’ve now completed your crash course on the Tradable Bits’ UGC stream, we can’t wait to see what you come up with! If you have more questions, please reach out to your Customer Success team or contact support@tradablebits.com