If you’re looking for a way to connect your brick and mortar retail experience with your brand’s online presence—leveraging location-based social content is a great place to start.Customer photos on social media provide powerful social proof for your brand and products. These photos can be a valuable asset to enhancing your in-store experience as well as your brand’s other digital channels. Using the Pixlee platform, our clients are able to collect and identify top customer photos based on location and deliver highly personalized messages to customers.‍

4 Ways that Brands Can Collect User-Generated Content by Location:

1-    Geo-fence Social Media Collection

Geo-fencing allows your brand to set up a virtual perimeter around any address and collect all social media content geo-tagged inside that area. The collection radius has no minimum or maximum size-- and can get as specific as 500ft. This is a viable option for collecting content from a specific event, storefront, or stadium.

2-    Email Upload

Email upload allows brands to set up a specific email address that fans can send their photos to. Pictures taken on smartphones typically record metadata that brands can leverage to identify the photo’s location. Email upload is a great way to engage less tech-savvy demographics who feel more comfortable using email.

3-    Mobile or Website Uploads

Out-of-the-box uploading allows customers to submit their brand photos to shopping apps, your brand’s website, or campaign microsites. Again, photos taken on smartphones typically record metadata that brands can leverage to identify the photo’s location. This is an ideal option for customers who would like to submit their content directly instead of through a social channel.

4-    Specific Hashtags & Brand Mentions

Hashtags allow your brand to collect any photos tagged as a specific topic or with a brand mention. After condusting a hashtag search, you can filter these photos based on location (either by geo-fencing or through smartphones’ recorded metadata) to find relevant content. This is a great way to find photos from concerts, ski resorts, hotels, or malls that may have been taken at a specific venue, but posted later on.

With increased smartphone adoption, consumers are posting over 2 billion photos every day. Brands have a prime opportunity to leverage location specific user-generated content and feature it on digital displays in their stores and across their digital channels. By incorporating user-generated content into their marketing strategy, our clients have proven time and time again how customer photos can dramatically affect their bottom line.