20 User Generated Content Examples That Still Work in 2026
Krunal Vaghasiya|Sep 16, 2024
User-generated content is any content about your brand that a customer made, not you. Reviews, photos, unboxing videos, TikToks, forum posts, testimonials.
It works because the person who made it had nothing to gain from it.
Below are 20 campaigns worth stealing from, ideas you can run this month, and what to do about rights before anything goes into an ad.
What Is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content, or UGC, is content about a product made by the people who bought it rather than the company selling it.
Who made it decides what it is:
- Your marketing team made it. That is brand content.
- A customer made it, unprompted. That is UGC.
- You paid someone with an audience. That is influencer content, a third thing again.
It covers more than photos. All of these count:
- A tagged Instagram post
- A written review or star rating, which is where most product reviews start
- A YouTube unboxing
- A Reddit thread or forum answer
- A before-and-after in a Facebook group
Why UGC Works Better Than Brand Content
Three reasons, and only the first one is about trust.
- It carries no incentive. A customer photo was not made to sell anything, and shoppers can tell. Your own product shot was.
- It shows the product in a real room. Studio lighting hides scale and texture. A photo on a kitchen counter answers the questions your product page cannot.
- It costs a fraction of a shoot. A campaign that collects a hundred customer photos replaces a photoshoot budget and refreshes itself.
The numbers behind this sit in our social proof statistics if you want the research.
UGC vs Influencer Content
These get grouped together and they behave differently.
- UGC is unpaid and unprompted. The customer bought the thing, liked it, and posted. Credibility is high, volume is unpredictable, and you cannot brief it.
- Influencer content is paid and briefed. You control the message, the timing and the format. Credibility is lower because the audience knows it was paid for, which is the trade influencer marketing makes on purpose.
- Paid UGC sits between them. You hire a UGC creator to shoot in the style of a customer, with no audience involved. It is a production method, not social proof, and it should be disclosed.
Use UGC for trust, influencer content for reach, and paid UGC when you need volume in a hurry.
All your reviews in one place
Collect reviews, manage every response, and display them where they matter most.
20 UGC Campaign Examples From Real Brands
These are grouped by tactic rather than by brand, so you can skip to the approach that fits what you sell. Hashtag campaigns need an audience with something to say. Reposts need customers already posting. Testimonials suit anything with a long decision, and contests suit anything people make something with.
For each one: what the brand did, why it worked, and the first thing to copy.
Hashtag campaigns that worked
A branded hashtag works when people already have something to say, and it turns scattered posts into a library you can still find months later. These six gave people the reason.
1. Crocs, #MyCrocsEra
Asked customers to show how they styled their Crocs, then ran the best on the brand’s own grid and in paid social.
The product splits opinion, which is the point. Nobody posts about shoes they feel neutral on, and the arguments in the replies did as much reach as the posts.
Copy it by finding the thing people already defend or mock about your product, and asking about that.
2. ClearTrip, #TravelWithClearTrip
Collected traveller photos from trips booked on the platform and ran them across social and the site.
The product never appears in a single photo. The trip is the content and the booking is implied, which is why it reads as a holiday album rather than an ad.
Works for anything that enables an experience rather than being one.
3. Doritos, #BurnSelfie
Asked people to film their reaction to an extremely hot chip and post it.
A physical reaction takes ten seconds to film, needs no editing, and cannot be faked convincingly. The barrier to entry was almost zero.
If your product causes a visible reaction, the reaction is the campaign.
4. Calvin Klein, #MyCalvins
Opened the hashtag with celebrities, then let customers continue it.
Seeding with recognisable names gave everyone else a format to copy. People rarely invent a pose. They imitate one.
Post three examples yourself before you ask anyone else to.
5. LaCroix, #LiveLaCroix
Built the brand’s visual identity out of customer photos of the cans, on Instagram and on the site.
The packaging was already colourful enough to photograph well, so customers were shooting it before anyone asked. The hashtag just collected what existed.
Check whether people are already posting your product before you plan a campaign to make them.
6. Chipotle, #GuacMode
Ran a hashtag around the guacamole obsession customers already had.
The brand did not invent the enthusiasm, it named it. That is a much shorter route than manufacturing a reason to post.
Search your brand name on social and look for the thing that comes up unprompted.
Reposting what customers already made
No hashtag, no contest. Just finding what customers already made and putting it somewhere useful, which is where fit, size and colour get answered.
7. Louis Vuitton
Reposted customer photos of products in daily use, on an account otherwise built on campaign photography.
A luxury brand showing unpolished photos is signalling confidence. The contrast against the rest of the feed is what makes it land.
The more polished your usual output, the more a customer photo stands out.
8. Lululemon
Featured customers in classes and on runs rather than in studio shoots, across social and product pages.
Showing the product doing the job it was bought for removes the explaining. A photo of leggings mid-run answers questions a flat lay cannot.
Ask customers for the photo taken while using it, not the one taken when it arrived.
9. Nike
Told stories about ordinary runners alongside the athlete campaigns.
Putting the aspirational next to the achievable makes both easier to believe. The elite athlete sets the standard, the everyday runner makes it look reachable.
Run one customer story for every brand story and watch which gets replies.
10. eBay
Shared what buyers had found, turning a catalogue into a stream of discoveries.
On a marketplace the inventory is already the content. Every unusual purchase is a story someone else wants to see.
If you sell variety, the finds are your feed.
11. Macy’s
Collected the moments people wore the clothes for: weddings, first days, reunions.
Asking about the occasion instead of the garment gets a story back rather than a product shot. The clothes appear anyway.
Change the question from what did you buy to what did you wear it for.
Testimonials used as marketing
The formats that carry the most weight late in a decision, especially in B2B. There are more testimonial examples worth borrowing structure from.
12. JotForm
Pulled customer testimonials straight into paid ad creative instead of writing ad copy.
The ad is a real review, unedited, with the product underneath. It gets past the filter people have for advertising because it does not sound like advertising.
Read your last fifty reviews before you brief another ad.
All your reviews in one place
Collect reviews, manage every response, and display them where they matter most.
13. Slack
Published customer stories about how teams changed the way they worked, in long-form on the site.
In B2B the story is the workflow change. The feature list is what your competitor also has, so it persuades nobody.
Ask what the team stopped doing, not what the software does.
14. PlayVox
Published testimonials that included the customer’s own numbers, named and attributed.
One specific figure survives scepticism in a way that praise never does. A reader can picture a percentage. They cannot picture great experience.
Ask for the number in the interview, then get sign-off to publish it.
All your reviews in one place
Collect reviews, manage every response, and display them where they matter most.
15. Glossier
Put customer stories on the blog and built new products out of what came back.
Acting on the feedback in public is what turns a customer into an advocate. The content was the input to the roadmap, not just the marketing.
Tell people what changed because of what they said.
Contests and communities
Higher effort to run, and they keep producing after the campaign ends.
16. Vitamix
Ran a Smoothie of the Year contest where every entry was a recipe someone had made at home.
The entries were useful whether they won or not, so the contest left behind a recipe library. Most contests leave behind nothing.
Design the entry so it has a second life as content.
17. Sephora
Built the Beauty Insider community, where customers post looks and answer each other’s questions.
Once a community is running it produces content after you stop prompting it, and answers support questions you would otherwise pay to answer.
Slow to start, and the hardest thing on this list for a competitor to copy.
18. Netflix
Amplified Stranger Things fan art and theories rather than only running trailers.
Fan work is promotion you did not pay for, provided you make room for it. Ignoring it does not stop it, it just wastes it.
Find the fan accounts before you plan the launch campaign.
19. T-Mobile
Invited people to write breakup letters to their old carrier.
Frustration with a competitor is a strong prompt as long as the frustration is real. In a category people complain about anyway, the campaign gave the complaint somewhere to go.
Only works if the switching pain is genuine. It reads as hollow otherwise.
20. Adobe
Ran the Art Maker Series featuring work made in Adobe tools by the people who use them.
When your product makes things, the output is the proof. No claim about the software competes with seeing what someone built in it.
Feature the maker as well as the work, or it reads as a gallery.
UGC Content Ideas You Can Run This Month
Small prompts that produce content without a campaign budget.
- Ask one question in the post-purchase email. “Send us a photo of it in place” gets more back than “leave a review”.
- Run a caption contest on a photo a customer already sent.
- Feature a customer of the week on stories. The slot creates the supply.
- Ask for the unboxing in the box, on a card, while the box is open.
- Turn support answers into content. The question one customer asked is the question fifty are searching.
- Ask what they use it with. Pairings and combinations give you content and merchandising ideas at once.
- Collect the before photo. Anything with a visible result should be asking for the starting point.
- Repost with credit, publicly. Doing it once tells everyone else it is worth posting.
How to Get Permission to Use UGC
Most guides skip this, and it is where people get into trouble. A customer posting about you does not give you the right to put it in an ad.
What you need, in order of strength:
- Written permission naming the use. A reply granting rights for a stated purpose: social, paid ads, website, print. Vague permission is weak permission.
- Terms built into the form. When someone uploads through your review form or a contest entry, the permission wording sits in the form and applies when they hit send.
- A hashtag with published terms. Weaker than the other two, and rejected outright in some places. Do not rely on it alone for paid media.
Two things to check every time. Music in a customer video is licensed to the platform, not to you, so lifting a TikTok into a paid ad can create a copyright claim. And anyone recognisable in the frame needs their own permission, not just the person who posted it.
Keep the record. Screenshot the grant, log the date and the scope, and store it against the asset.
How to Run a UGC Campaign
Step 1. Pick the format that fits the objection
Work backwards from what stops people buying.
- Sizing doubts need photos on real bodies.
- Complexity doubts need a video of the setup.
- Price doubts need a testimonial with a number in it.
Step 2. Make sending it take under a minute
Every step costs you submissions. Upload inside the review form is the easiest. An email address is harder, a hashtag harder still, and a form behind a login loses almost everyone.
Step 3. Put it where the decision happens
Put customer photos on the product page beside the buy button, and testimonials on the pricing page beside the plan. A gallery on a page nobody visits is content you paid to collect and then hid. Our guide to social proof widgets covers the display side.
Step 4. Keep it running
A campaign produces a spike. A request that fires after every order produces a supply. The second one is what you want, and it is the part most brands never set up.
UGC Mistakes to Avoid
- Editing what customers sent. Cropping, filtering and colour-correcting removes the thing that made it credible.
- Only showing five-star content. A page of perfect reviews reads as filtered. A four-star review with a specific complaint makes the rest believable.
- Using it without permission. Reposting to stories is one thing. Putting a customer’s face in a paid ad without asking is another.
- Collecting and not displaying. Most brands have more customer content than they show, sitting in a folder nobody opens.
- Launching a hashtag with no reason to use it. The hashtag is a container, not a prompt. Give people something to say first.
How WiserReview Handles UGC Collection
Everything above takes ongoing work. Asking each customer at the right moment, chasing photos, checking what arrives, then getting it onto the page where it counts.
WiserReview runs that cycle:
- Requests go out after each order by email, SMS, WhatsApp or QR code, with follow-up sequences.
- Photo and video upload inside the review form.
- Moderation filters what comes in before it appears.
- Display runs through 18 or more widgets on product pages and popups.
Verified purchase labels tie each one to a real order.
All your reviews in one place
Collect reviews, manage every response, and display them where they matter most.
Where to Start
Pick the objection that costs you the most sales, ask customers for the one format that answers it, and put what comes back next to the buy button.
That is about a week of work. It will do more than a campaign you plan for three months and never launch, and it gives you something to build the bigger one on later.
Also check: 27 social proof examples that seal the deal
Related Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What are user-generated content examples?
Customer photos and videos, reviews and star ratings, hashtag campaigns like #MyCrocsEra, unboxing videos, case studies, and forum or community posts. Anything about your brand that a customer made rather than your marketing team.
What is UGC content?
UGC is content about a product made by the people who bought it. If your team made it, it is brand content. If a customer made it unprompted, it is UGC. If you paid someone with an audience, that is influencer content.
Can I use customer photos in my ads?
Not without written permission naming paid advertising as the use. A public post is not a licence. Also strip the audio, since music in a customer video is licensed to the platform and not to you.
How do I get customers to create UGC?
Ask at the right moment and make it take under a minute. A post-purchase email asking for one photo beats a hashtag with no prompt behind it, and reposting publicly once shows everyone else it is worth doing.
Where should I display UGC on my site?
Product pages next to the buy button, and pricing pages next to the plan. A gallery on a page nobody visits is content you paid to collect and then hid.
Krunal Vaghasiya is a marketing tech expert who boosts e-commerce conversion rates with automated social proof and FOMO strategies. He loves to keep posting insightful posts on online marketing software, marketing automations, and improving conversion rates.
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