SPRING 2024

114
THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK
JOE DYSART FINDING & RE-SHARING POSITIVE SOCIAL MEDIA ABOUT YOUR FASTENER DISTRIBUTION BRAND from page 46
And still others offer detailed demonstration videos by
satisfied customers that offer helpful tips on how to use a
product -- or how to use a product most effectively.
In addition, UGC platforms go beyond video to
discover and repurpose other formats of UGC, including
as text-based social media posts, text-based reviews,
text-based comments in online forums,Tweets, podcast
content -- and virtually any other form of content found on
social media.
Granted, fastener distributor marketers can search
manually for all this free promotional content just waiting
to be used. Essentially, there’s nothing stopping them
from spending hours each day visiting the scores of social
networks where they know or believe unsolicited company
endorsements might show-up.
But fortunately, UGC platforms are designed to
relieve marketers of this busy work. They use hashtags,
keywords, key-phrases and similar search variables to
automatically scan for UGC promotional content on all the
social media hang-outs that marketers monitor.
Besides using UGC platforms to mine social media
for positive content generated at the grassroots, many
of these services also enable fastener distributors to
encourage everyday customers to produce UGC that can
be used for marketing.
Says Burrelles’ Robbins: “Brands often motivate
customers through giveaways, awards and recognition,
contests, or exclusive or early access incentives.”
Given that there are a wide variety of UGC platforms
vying for the social media needs of fastener distributors,
you’ll most likely want to go for a best-of-breed solution.
B2B BUSINESS OFTEN GET
ESPECIALLY GREAT MILEAGE FROM
POSITIVE UGC CONTENT THEY FIND
ON LINKEDIN
These services go
beyond simply helping
you discover, curate
and re-share UGC
content that sings your
company’s praises.
Instead, they also
offer tools that
enable you to secure
media rights -- when
necessary -- from the
creators of UGC you’d
BEST-OF-BREED UGC PLATFORMS AUTO-FIND VIRTUALLY ALL
FORMS OF UGC CONTENT, INCLUDING VIDEO.
like to use to promote your distributorship.
And they also enable you to auto-integrate UGC
favorable to your brand into your ecommerce store.
For example: Many of these platforms enable you to
automatically integrate images of a number of positive
Tweets about a specific product -- or a number of similar
images of positive posts on another social media network
-- into the description you have of that product in your
online shop.
Plus, top UGC platforms also offer analytics and
report detailing how well the UGC you find-and-use is
performing on your Web site, in your ecommerce store
-- and across social media.
Bottom line: UGC platforms are at least worth a
serious gander from any fastener distributor looking to
easily cast a wide net for all the positive UGC about their
brand that’s scattered across social media ecosystem.
Here’s a representative sampling of what you’ll find:
¤ EmbedSocial (www.embedsocial.com) - This UGC
platform specializes in gathering positive UGC from
across social media, helping users curate it -- and then
re-publishing the content on a company’s Web site.
The service features five tools: Embed Album, which
embeds positive UGC photos on your Web site using
a widget. Then there’s EmbedReviews, which embeds
Google and Yelp reviews on your site. And EmbedFeed,
which replicates content from a specific social media
network on a ‘brand wall’ on your Web site.
EmbedSocial also offers EmbedForms, which you can
use to create and solicit customer satisfaction surveys.
And there’s EmbedStories, a widget that collects and
publishes Instagram stories on your Web site.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 115