Our Social Essential offering allows you to gather Instagram UGC via specific @mentions, tags, and #hashtags; moderate the collected UGC; create content rules; manage and request usage permissions for the UGC; match the UGC to a product in your catalog; and ultimately display the UGC in curated galleries on your website homepage, PLPs, and/or PDPs.
This article contains the following sections:
- Enabling Social Essential
- Product Feed
- Collecting Content
- Moderating Content
- Managing Content and Permissions
- Assigning a Conversion Unit
- Automated Content Approval/Rejection
- Display
- Best Practices
Enabling Social Essential
To get started, ask your Implementation Team or Account Team to enable your account for Social Essential. (It is a best practice to move 'bad' product records off of your PowerReviews merchant before enablement so that they do not appear in the Social Essential platform, which heavily leverages your Product Feed.)
To access Social Essential, once enabled:
1. Log into the PowerReviews Portal
2. Click on Social Collection in the left-hand menu
Using Google Chrome: This browser features a single-sign-on experience, so you are already signed in.
Using Safari: You will be required to sign in again. To avoid this step again in future, select Remember Cookies upon re-signing in.
Product Feed
Once Social Essential is enabled, your Product Feed will automatically begin loading there; the feed updates every 24 hours on the platform. If you need an immediate update to your Product Feed, contact your Implementation Team or PowerReviews Technical Support to initiate this manually.
If/when you remove a product from your Ratings and Reviews Product Feed, it will also be removed from the same feed that's being leveraged for Social Essential.
Collecting Content
This is a one-time setup process for content collection for your account(s).
To collect content from Instagram, you have a few options:
- @mentions: Collect all content where your account is mentioned
- Tags: Collect all content your Instagram account has been tagged in
- Hashtags: Collect all content for specific #hashtags
To Begin:
1. Click the Create Campaign button.
2. Click the LOGIN WITH FACEBOOK button and log into your company's Facebook account. In order for Social Essential to function properly, you must be the administrator of your company's accounts.
Note: If the password of your account changes, you will need to re-authorize your account to ensure content continues to be ingested.
3. When prompted, choose the appropriate company Instagram handle and click Continue.
4. To collect tagged content (ie., when your account is tagged on the photo itself rather than with an @mention), check the Collect all content your Instagram account has been tagged in checkbox.
5. To collect hashtag content, specify one or more hashtags to monitor. Content containing at least one of the hashtags listed will be collected.
Example (Edit Stream):
6. The new campaign will appear on the Campaigns page.
Content will begin to flow into the tool as of the date of authorization; it will not pull in content prior to that day. Images and videos will begin to flow continuously into the Social Essential tool when users mention your brand or handle in their Instagram posts, as per your campaign specifications.
Non-English Language Support:
- Campaigns can be run for any language or locale, but the Social Essential tool is only available in English.
- The Permission to Use text should be localized during campaign creation. Your Account Team or PowerReviews Technical Support can help you update this.
Moderating Content
Once content starts to flow into the Social Essential tool, you will be able to determine which pieces of content you would or would not be interested in displaying on your site through content moderation.
To moderate a piece of UGC, click the Content > Manage tab. You have the ability to select several items at once and Approve or Reject for moderation in bulk, or you can individually moderate one by one.
If you need to review the piece of content further, simply click into it and you will have the ability to Approve or Reject the content within the image selection in the upper right side of the content selection screen:
Managing Content and Permissions
Once content starts to flow into the Social Essential tool and is actioned by you or your team, it will be in one of five mutually exclusive states:
- Not Requested
- Requested
- Granted
- Refused
- Follow Up
The tool will display actionable content that includes an @mention from the author. When you or your team requests rights to a piece of content by commenting on the user's post, the status will be changed from Not Requested to Requested. To respond, the original author of the post must comment back with an @mention:
- If a comment contains an @mention and consent hashtag #YES, the content's status will be changed to Granted
- If a comment contains an @mention and refusal hashtag #NO, the content's status will be changed to Refused
- If a comment contains an @mention but does not have either #YES or #NO, or has both #YES and #NO, the status will be changed to Follow Up so that you can clarify with the author
Unless you want to follow-up, do not click on the permissions while asking for rights to the content.
Permission to Use Request Language
Upon the creation of your PowerSocial account, PowerReviews will set up your Permission to Use language for you. This will need to include an instruction that captures the @mention of your brand, as well as a content grant keyword hashtag and a content refusal keyword hashtag (the defaults are #YES and #NO). The language can be whatever you would like it to be. The default consent request message is: "Great photo! We'd love to share it on our site. Reply @yourbrand #YES if that's OK."
Tagged and Hashtag Content
Users cannot post a request for rights directly from the Content Details page (Instagram only allows posts via API for content where the author directly @mentions the brand). However, the user can use a link on the Content Details page under the Permission to Use section to open up the content on the Instagram web app to paste the message and request rights.
When the content author @mentions the brand when replying to grant permission, the Permission to Use status of the content will be updated to Granted automatically.
Content Usage and Ownership
If the author granted permission (#YES) via your legal language request, you may also use that content in other marketing resources.
Professional Services
If you are on PowerReviews' Social Essential+, our Professional Services offering, our moderators will handle UGC moderation, user permissions, and product matching on your behalf.
If you are not on PowerReviews' Social Essential+ Professional Services offering, these actions must be owned by you or your team. If you have any questions about which tier you are on, getting trained on the Social Essential tool, or any other related topics, please contact your Account Team.
Assigning a Conversion Unit
Once you've successfully moderated a piece of content and received permission to use it, you can assign a product, or Conversion Unit, to the image.
Assigning Conversion Units to UGC generates website traffic and conversions by providing visitors to your gallery the opportunity to click through from the UGC to products on your site. Your PowerReviews Product Feed syncs to allow you to type in the name of a product or the page ID (SKU as defined by Wyng) and select the product in the image.
Completing this step makes the product shoppable to drive a customer to that product's PDP when viewing in a gallery on your website.
You may tag several products at once if there are multiple products featured in the image.
Note: Assigning a Conversion Unit is REQUIRED for a product to appear in any IRL or PDP gallery with Social Essential.
Automated Content Approval/Rejection
Content Rules allow you to create rules for Social Essential to Approve and Reject content from the following sources automatically:
- Author by (ambassadors, influencers, or other profiles you have relationships with to use their content)
- Containing keyword, hashtag, or username
- From Stream (content gathered by any of the streams you have configured)
Each rule can contain 50 profiles or @mentions. Only letters, numbers, underscores ( _ ), and periods ( . ) are allowed. Do not include the @ symbol. You can name the rules, edit, add, or remove them.
To Begin:
1. Navigate to the Content Rules Page.
If there are no rules currently set up, the following page opens:
2. Add an Instagram Rule.
To add Rules by content Author:
- Rejected: This automatically rejects Permission to Use by the added authors
- Approved: This automatically approves content written by the added authors
- Granted Permission to use: This automatically grants Permission to Use by the added authors
3. Edit a Rule.
To edit a pre-existing rule:
Example (Card with one Rule):
Display
Once the author has granted permission to use their content, it will be displayed in the Visual Content Gallery on the applicable homepage, PLP, and/or PDP. On the PDP, it will display in-line in the PowerReviews Image Gallery on your Review Display with any natively collected images/videos from the Write-a-Review form.
You will be able to see this in the PowerReviews Portal under Reviews > Images & Videos.
Example (UGC under Portal Moderation that was Approved, granted #YES permissions, and assigned a Conversion Unit):
The content can also be displayed via the following options:
- In Real Life: The In Real Life (IRL) Gallery is a JavaScript Snippet you can add to your website to highlight customer-sourced UGC from Instagram, across your entire product catalog. The IRL Snippet is traditionally placed on your homepage, and can also be placed on category pages and may be used for hashtag galleries.
- Shop All Page: The Shop All feature is an optional standalone landing page you can add to your website that allows your customers to see all UGC you've collected from the Social Suite, across all of your products.
Best Practices
- Choose unique and on-brand hashtags that resonate with your customers, and promote them in multiple places (don't forget to engage your influencer community!)
- Utilize UGC tagging for all content collected in the Social Essential tool to make approving, rejecting, and product matching easier for you and your teams
- Repurpose your collected UGC in other marketing campaigns and resources (if you've received #YES consent from the author)
- Track the amount of content collected, approved, permissions granted, and products matched via analytics