Until a few years ago, there was lots of buzz about user generated content. I remember lots of websites used to talk about it. Social networking was catching up and lots of content was being generated by users, without getting paid for it, for websites like YouTube and Digg.

Even smaller websites were encouraging people to leave comments in the comments section and online forums hoping that it would improve their SEO due to highly focused content generation.

User generated content can consist of reviews that people leave on your website, videos, photos, questions and answers and comments. With every new question, with every new comment, a new URL is generated, and it gives Google and other search engines something new to crawl and index.

One thing is undoubtedly clear: user generated content is one of the fastest and cheapest ways of generating targeted content and consequently, boosting your content marketing. Through user generated content

• You are letting your users, visitors, customers and clients tell your story and participate in your evolution.
• You let people talk about your brand instead of the marketing message coming from you.
• Other people, not directly connected to your business, increasing your brand presence.
• People themselves talk about the pros and cons of working with you.
• User generated content, especially if it is favourable to your business, provides you ongoing social proof.
• Your prospective customers and clients find user generated content more trustworthy. According to a Nielsen study 92% of consumers trust organic, user generated content more than traditional marketing messages.

It also gives the search engines lots of content to crawl and index, on an ongoing basis.

This Search Engine Land blog post says that though user generated content can help you, it can also be counter-productive and hence, whenever you plan to make user generated content an integral part of your content marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it helps your SEO efforts, and doesn’t hurt them.

How to incorporate user generated content into your content marketing?

Using user generated content for content marketing isn’t a random exercise that you can immediately kick-start by installing a few plug-ins into your website. You need to keep in mind that unsupervised discussions can take tangential turns and turn into uncontrollable disasters.

But the question of uncontrollable disasters happens only when you have enough content to cause you trouble. So, first, you need to figure out how to make people, how to enable people, to generate content for your brand. Here are a few things you can do:

• Allow people to leave comments: This facility might already be there on your blog or website if you’re using a content management system like WordPress. Many Webmasters turn this feature off because of the comment-spam problem, but if you can establish a mechanism to monitor your comments, this is one of the finest ways of getting user generated content on your website.
• Install a discussion forum: Online forums and discussion boards are one of the oldest mass conversation channels on the Internet. Even when there were no browsers, there were discussion boards. Online forums can have very rich SEO-centric content especially when your forum catches on and people begin to use it on a regular basis. Again, spam can be a big problem.
• Allow people to post blog posts on your website: Many websites allow visitors to set up an account and post content. You can let them submit entries as drafts and later you can review them and publish them.
• Start a review section: In this section people can leave reviews on your products and services, just like Amazon has it.
• Start a Q&A section: Questions and answers are favourites of the search engines. This is because most of the searches were carried out in the form of questions – you ask a question and Google provides you the answer. In a Q&A section the questions and answers are already there.
• Allow people to upload images and videos: This can be an expensive affair because images and videos mean more online storage space and more bandwidth. But if you can afford it, you can generate lots of traffic to this type of content. One-fourth of Google searches are images.

The main problem with user generated content is of course, moderation and protection against spam. Spam bots can post thousands of comments in a single day, bringing your entire website down and irreparably harm your SEO. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why people shy away from installing online forums on their websites. Otherwise, you would find them on every website.

My personal suggestion is, stay away from installing an online forum unless running a forum is your primary activity or you have a dedicated department to oversee the conversations.

The most useful forms of user generated content in terms of both content marketing and SEO are inviting people to write blog posts for your website and encouraging them to participate in the Q&A section. This way, you can control the flow and direction of your content.