Why Brands Should Focus On Users’ Social Content Legal Rights?

For the first time in marketing history, users’ created content is playing a huge role in the promotion of the brand and building customer trust. 

Instead of creating branded content, collecting and displaying user-generated content from diverse social media platforms is the primary content strategy for new-age competitive marketers.

But do you know sharing users’ content without their permission imposes legal actions on you? 

To maintain a brand’s image and loyalty, understanding users’ content legal rights should be an extensive approach to every marketer.

So without making any further due, let’s dive into the legal rights of content created by your social media community. 

Why Is It Even Important To Focus On Legal Rights When UGC Is Free

Thinking user generated content has no legal validity is the first mistake marketers usually make while acquiring content from social media platforms. 

User-generated content contains intellectual property rights of the content creator; repurposing it for own benefits or any profits making activity without the consent of the creator is an infringement of copyrights. 

Content available on social media is free, but it doesn’t mean that you can use it freely. Laws are binding social media copyrights that protect the intellectual property of the content creator. 

As per the Terms and Policies of social media networks, one can share the content of the other people on their social media account; however, using it for any profit creation purposes unknowingly to the content owner, increasing the risk of legal actions on them. 

For marketers and brands to utilize their users’ created content, seeking content rights from the owner is crucial. It will maintain the brand’s reputation and keeps marketers away from any legal troubles. 

Being the potent reason,  obtaining legal rights from content creators is vital for every marketer before making the UGC part of a promotional strategy.

How Acquiring Social Content Legal Rights Foster Marketing Campaign

User-generated content is a great way to build a highly influential and effective marketing campaign – but it is only successful when UGC is incorporated rightfully. 

There is no doubt that UGC is an essential part of marketing strategies in this growing competitive landscape, but to ensure zero legal troubles, getting users’ legal rights is significant for maintaining a strong brand image in the market. 

Thus, it increases UGC’s role in social media legal rights before repurposing it for the marketing campaign. Here below are the benefits of focusing on UGC legal rights for the brands. 

1. Revamp Brand’s Image

Brands asking permission from content owners to use their social media content for advertising and marketing purposes enhance the brand image among social media communities. 

As the social media content is the users’ intellectual property, approaching customers personally to get the right of their content for branding purposes ensures creators the fair use of their content, which in turn deepens the reputation of the brand among social media content creators. 

2. Nay To Legal Troubles 

Many brands come under lawsuits due to user-generated content as they do not follow the right practice to utilize other people’s social media content. In order to keep your brand away from courts, obtaining legal rights is the only and best solution. 

Also brands will save tons of money which they may lose while fighting for the illegal practice of users’ created content.

Don’t assume that if customers are sharing their content on social media they are permitting you to use it freely, if used without their permission, they can sue you anytime. 

3. Building Trust With Audience

Integrating customer-generated content in marketing campaigns with their consent and defining its purpose builds trust in the customers. 

Acquiring legal rights is the fair practice to let the content creator know before repurposing its profit-generating motives. 

4. Ethical Practice

In the eyes of the law, getting legal rights of UGC is the right practice, and every brand and marketers should follow when they are incorporating user-generated content in their marketing campaign. 

All former points mentioned can be obtained if the right UGC practice is followed, and getting users’ legal rights is subsequent to righteous social media content practice. In this way, you can build trust, authenticity, and enhance the prestige of the brand. 

Best Practice of Obtaining Users’ Social Content With Legal Rights

As of now, you have come to know the significance of legal rights while utilizing user-generated content in marketing strategies. 

Procuring users created social media content is the foremost action that marketers should incorporate for creating their UGC marketing campaign.

To create a high performing and profitable UGC marketing campaign, marketers are required to follow relevant guidelines to obtain permission from users and run promotions legally. 

To use UGC, marketers first need to determine the intent of using their user-generated content and define it in the Terms and Conditions of using UGC to share it with their social content creator community. 

That said, getting UGC rights depends on what purposes you are using and how much your customers are aware of it. Based on that, your user-generated content rights follow the two types of acquiring consent. 

1. Implicit Consent
2. Explicit Consent

Implicit Consent

If you are running a hashtag campaign and asking your customers to share content on social media using your hashtag, they are already authorizing you the rights to use their content. 

You can use this content on your official social media account, website, and creating social walls. 

With implicit consent, you are clear that users are permitting you to use their content, and they are creating it with their own will giving the brand’s right to use it in their social building content.  

However, if your purpose to user-generated content changes, for instance, to use it in creating banner ads, advertisements, magazine cover pages, news, journals, etc. then Implicit consent is of no use. In such a case, you have to take a step further and ask for explicit consent.

Explicit Consent

In order to make user-generated content as part of core marketing activities, you are required to get complete legal rights of your customers’ created content.

As user-generated content is the intellectual property of your customers, using it in profit-making or brand’s promotional activity, obligates you to ask for explicit consent from the content creator.   

Explicit consent is the process of asking permission from the content owner directly and earning their approval to use it legally. 

You can practice explicit consent in two ways, either using hashtag consent or checkbox consent method, depending on the purpose of your marketing purpose.

With hashtag consent, you can ask permission from the content owner by asking to approve with #hashtag in their comment section below that particular post.  

If the content owner replies with the given hashtag, it means content owner giving their rights to use their content. However, the problem with hashtag consent is that it is not restricted by any law and has any strong legal proof with it. 

Thus, to get the full rights of users’ content, you are required to focus on checkbox consent. 

With checkbox consent, you give users a professional and legitimate platform to allow you to use their created content. 

In this type of consent, owner has to go through a deliberate process of permitting marketers with their rights to use their images or any other type of content for marketing purposes.

This is the most professional, valid, and compelling way of gaining users’ rights to their social media content and integrate users’ social media content for marketing campaigns without worrying of any legal troubles. 

Wield Rights Management Software To Procure Users’ Social Content Legitimately

You can use Taggbox Rights Management to obtain content creators’ rights legitimately by acquiring all the legal rights associated with the users’ content. 

With Taggbox Rights Management, you earn full UGC rights with all legal proof that includes users granted permission, timestamp, region, IP address, and content creator’s full consent. 

This not only ensures content creators that their content is used for fair purposes, but it also gives brands complete legal rights to brands to incorporate UGC in their marketing campaign, with no legal hassles. 

Conclusion

To maintain the reputation of your brand and keep happy your legal team members, obtaining legal rights of the users’ created content is the indispensable part of building users’ content-oriented marketing campaigns. 

Disclaimer: Above mentioned content is not considered to be legal advice; it is created for informational purposes.