Cara Meiselman, Skillshare

My name is Cara Meiselman. I am the Director of Community and Content at ClassPass. ClassPass is a fitness app where a membership with ClassPass gives you access to all the amazing local studios and gyms in your area and you can use us wherever ClassPass is, so all over the globe. It actually was founded by our founder, Pyle Kadakia. She's going to be speaking at Inbound, actually. And it stemmed from a need for her to find a dance class. She was looking for a dance class. She couldn't find one and she wanted a place where it was almost like a Google search for studio fitness. And that's kind of where the idea from ClassPass began. I gave a talk all about using customers to help fuel your content, so really leveraging user-generated content and encouraging more of it, creating more UGCs so that way you don't have to worry about creating all the content that you need to fill your marketing campaigns. No matter what brand, what industry you're in, there's always opportunity for users to create UGC. It could be in the form of a review, in a testimonial, maybe it's an image, maybe it's a video, but depending on your business, it really is kind of what's natural to your customer and what's going to be the most impactful for you to be able to sell to future customers. So figuring out the kind of content you're looking for that really helps convert people and then leveraging your current happy customers to help you create that content. For ClassPass, seeing studios and understanding that you can take a bunch of different classes and try new things and all the amazing discovery pieces of it is one of our biggest value props. So having our customers, encouraging them to take photos at their classes using a certain designated hashtag, they usually use hashtag ClassPass, it helps us find and showcase different studios across the globe. So I'm based in New York, I take a lot of classes in New York, but I don't take classes in Singapore where we recently launched. So by encouraging our customers to really engage in the studio and take photos after their classes, we now have content across the globe and I can showcase the really amazing studios in Boston, in Singapore, in London, everywhere. When it comes to creating more user-generated content and getting your customers to share there's definitely the most simple thing, which is to just ask and create the opportunities. So the more specific you can get, telling them exactly what hashtag to use, telling them what kind of images or content you're looking for, your best customers and your happiest, like biggest fans are definitely going to create that content for you no matter what. Then there's also of course the incentivizing. So whether you're doing it for a contest where the entry is to create some sort of UGC that you can then use or even, you know, I've done seen surveys where you get a gift card or you're entered to win or something, there's always the amazing way of incentivizing those conversations but before you even have to do that I would just simply ask them and tell them how you want the content to be delivered. But for the most part it's really organic and so we're able to use a lot of the content that our customers create to help inform our social strategy and fill our content calendars. I think now video is becoming much bigger and people are not only sharing a lot more videos but searching for a lot more videos. So whether that's in the form of a GIF or a boomerang or more of a long form video, I think for brands a lot of it is just getting out of your head of it needs to be the most perfect amazing quality but really it's just, you know, getting that content out there. If it's funny content, it's relatable content, it doesn't matter the production value. Seeing that video content is really engaging and can be very relatable, you know, showing it in its truest form of just shot on an iPhone is sometimes the best thing you can do. When people are scrolling through their feed and they see something that's super polished and like really overproduced, they can tell that it's an ad or it's something created by a brand whereas something that feels more natural in their feed could potentially end up being a little bit more engaging. So as much as you may want to stick to your brand guidelines and be really production heavy and have it look super polished, sometimes you'll have more success just using the user generated content shot on an iPhone and having it be a little rough. Yeah, when it comes to user generated content and asking for permission, that does have quite a large role. For me, I think it's always smart to ask permission before you're going to use anything, not just for organic social, but especially in like a paid situation. If you're using content for your paid advertising, you have to get permission in some sort of written form. An entry to a contest is a little bit different because there's normally rules written in there and part of the rules will likely be that this entry, your user generated content counts as an entry and that may end up being that you can now use it in any way that you'd like as a brand. So it's really just like about writing your rules, making sure it's really smart, being as transparent as possible. So asking for permission, even if you don't have to, even if technically you have the rights because the rules said so. Just doing right by your customers and doing right by the people who are creating this content for you and just being as open and transparent as possible. Every year is the year of video and it's not necessarily us trying to predict the future, but really that video is the most compelling content. This year, last year, probably next year, it's the most rich form of content that we have. It is the most engaging, it's the most favored in the news feed when you're talking about Facebook and Instagram and showing up at the top. So I think that the more brands can get on board and invest in video and not just video but also live video. So really leaning into Facebook Live and Instagram Live and all of those resources to just experience life as it's happening. I think this started with Snapchat where it was very clear that it didn't matter that it needs to be polished and perfect, it just needs to be in the moment and right now. And I think Facebook and Instagram Live is trying to do just that and capture that in the real moment activities. And what is so great about video is that yes, it's really trendy, it's really the video content of the year, but it's different kinds of videos. So we went from more of it being long form video to now being more short form video to now being live video and now it's even GIFs and boomerangs, so even snippets of videos. So I think just leveraging all of the different aspects and going with the trends as you see them. Don't be late to the game, don't worry about it looking perfect, really just testing and trying and going, like diving full force into it all. I think that in terms of the future trends, influencers has been a really big trend. I think everyone, every brand is really diving in, finding influencers to tell their story and really leveraging that. But I think probably in 2019 and definitely by 2020, there's just going to be so many influencers that you're probably going to lose a little bit of that authenticity at some point where it's going to feel so much of a sponsored poster and ad and the whole core of what influencer marketing was is going to be completely gone. So I would say leaning in on the micro influencers and understanding that not just the people with a lot of followings, but the more people that you can get to talk about your brand and who love your brand no matter how big they're following, that could be potentially the new frontier, the place that I would focus for my brand.