Influencer marketing has become a powerhouse. People trust people. When we see someone just like us (or someone we aspire to be) using a product that interests us, it makes the decision that much easier. But how do you even start to leverage user-generated content (UGC) if you haven’t tried before? That’s where Tagbox comes to the rescue, helping modern businesses collect and repurpose UGC for everything from their web pages to their marketing campaigns.
Tagbox: The Good and the Bad
There are millions of people on social media, all talking about their experiences. Thus, it’s imperative to leverage the UGC creators who are sharing their thoughts and feelings about your brand, your industry, or anything else related to your business. With Tagbox, that’s more easily attainable than ever. We loved a lot of what this platform has to offer and only encountered a few minute drawbacks.
What Tagbox Is Good At
With its three distinct products—the full UGC Suite, its Widgets, and its Social Wall Display—Tagbox offers a wide array of ways to find and utilize user-generated content. There’s a lot of potential in this platform, so let’s dissect its features and elaborate on some of the creative ways they can be used.
An all-in-one UGC solution
Let user-generated content transform your brand promotion. Tagbox’s dynamic dashboard lets you easily collect, organize, and publish content from over 15 social channels.
You’ll be able to browse content being posted on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and even Pinterest and Yelp, in addition to other platforms. Find items in personal account pages or stories, discover content via hashtags, or find mentions and tagged accounts.
From there, it’s easy to collect everything in Tagbox’s central hub. Organize potentially useful UGC assets using tags, collections, and filtering to build up a potent library of photos, videos, and real user reviews.
For example, your ecommerce operation can tag products in users’ images to create shoppable galleries that drive sales.
You can also remove the hassle of manual effort by letting Tagbox automatically monitor and moderate feeds, letting it screen for things like profanity or sensitive content.
Asset reuse can be a thorny path to walk, but Tagbox makes it easy to acquire rights to user-generated content.
You don’t have to scramble to contact creators individually. From the dashboard, send batch requests to gain consent certificates and full usage rights at scale, then rest easy knowing that you can legally repurpose the UGC you’ve found.
Publishing your acquired content is just as easy. With the click of a button, share the user content you’ve gotten rights to on your website, in print, in emails and online ads, and more. An easy-to-handle code snippet makes embedding UGC a breeze.
And, you’ll always stay on top of the latest and greatest content to potentially use. Tagbox’s feeds bring real-time UGC from connected accounts directly to you.
Finally, you’re not left guessing thanks to the built-in analytics. Identify and connect with top contributors through trackable influencer analytics. Optimize future campaigns based on ROI, overall revenue, and audience engagement. Plus, you’ll extend both your insights and capability with Tagbox’s integrations with Hootsuite, Buffer, WooCommerce, Shopify, and more.
With Tagbox’s UGC Suite, you have an all-encompassing system that helps you leverage user-generated content for the first time or do so more effectively by sourcing authentic, engaging assets.
Artful ways to reuse UGC assets
Tagbox offers a wide array of widgets and methods for repurposing the content you source.
Galleries of various types are available. Deploy a social feed widget on your website to showcase others’ social content in an appealing carousel. Or, leverage Tagbox’s UGC Gallery widget to customize and get creative with the display of UGC assets on any digital property of yours or even within emails.
Speaking of that, Tagbox also offers two widgets just for campaigns—one for emails and one for hashtags. The former lets you leverage UGC in email sequences of any sort to boost open and click-through rates and stoke the passion of recipients. The latter lets you pull posts from across all channels with ease using defined hashtags and Tagbox’s automated moderation.
Beyond that, Tagbox also offers widgets for tapping into social media stories and even user reviews from Google, Yelp, and other venues.
With the stories-focused widget, you can both capitalize on the buzz of limited-time posts and save this ephemeral content before it disappears forever, ensuring you never lose out on quality UGC just because it’s tied to an Instagram or TikTok Story.
Meanwhile, the ability to easily gather and highlight user reviews on your website and other properties gives you online reputation management a serious boost. Keep the rave reviews from your biggest fans front-and-center for others to see. This is a great way for businesses to build up their social proof.
All widgets are customizable, though we also think they look and display great right out of the box. They’re responsive to different displays (crucial for users on their phones whom social media posts will likely affect best) and you can tailor the feed layout, fonts, colors, pop-ups, card styles, and more. Or, go beyond preset customizations with CSS implementation for full creative freedom.
Website visitors tend to stay 90 seconds longer on a page with UGC on average. And studies show that UGC improves conversions by over 40% thanks to the authenticity of real customer experiences.
With Tagbox’s widgets, you’ll have a full arsenal of methods for reusing and displaying the UGC you’ve collected, thus getting site visitors to stay longer and become more likely to buy.
Maximize in-person engagement
We’ve only covered half of the equation when it comes to reusing UGC. There’s equally excellent potential in bringing user-generated assets offline and utilizing them in real-world displays.
Tagbox offers a unique product in the form of their Display (Social Wall). This brings your events, pop-up shops, and brick-and-mortar retail locations to life.
This integrated, all-in-one solution engages audiences at live happenings. Enliven your signage, digital displays, and more with an ever-updating feed of attendee content generated in real time.
You can pull from social channels in the usual ways to populate your in-person digital feed or allow for attendees to submit their firsthand experiences using QR codes, hashtags, or a bespoke URL. They’ll watch as their photo or video gets fed directly to the social wall, giving them an honest feeling of authentic participation and contribution.
And, fortunately, you won’t have to worry about pranksters adding unsavory to the feed thanks to Tagbox’s automated moderation and filtering.
Of course, you can make any customizations you’d like. Set backgrounds and colors, integrate your logo, and use the Studio feature to mix content between UGC, QR codes, poll results, other stored media, and more to keep your audience’s attention.
The possibilities are endless for where you can showcase your customized social media feeds via Tagbox’s Social Wall.
Display it at live physical events on venue screens to foster engagement. Publish your curated UGC on digital signage like mall displays, transit ads, billboards, and more. Drive visibility for sponsors by integrating sponsored posts creatively into your feeds on the display wall.
With this tool, you can leverage Tagbox’s great capabilities for hybrid and in-person events and locales, as well as all of your virtual needs.
Personalize your assets
Collections in Tagbox let you take what you’ve gathered and tweak it to fit your needs. Add custom CTAs, use CSS to integrate UGC into any container, brand galleries and other displays with banners, and a whole lot more.
Without losing the message, you can transform raw but relevant UGC into polished, on-brand content.
Use tags in your Collection to mark whether assets are ready to use as they are or if they need some effort to make them fit into a display, campaign, email, or other purpose. Fortunately, you get the aid of Tagbox’s AI, which can automatically tag visuals based on objects, scenes, text, and more.
You can slice and dice Collections however you see fit. Simply click to select posts and move them between Collections as your needs evolve. Then, share them with ease across channels. Everything within your digital ecosystem stays perfectly in sync.
Boost your campaigns
Tagbox knows that UGC isn’t happening in a vacuum. The key to leveraging it is by finding better ways to source it and use it to support your other marketing and customer relationship efforts.
First, we all know that hashtag campaigns are a tried-and-true way to discover and aggregate UGC. Tagbox helps you run hashtag campaigns that can produce unmatched results.
The software will help you disseminate your hashtag to followers and fans, then collect responses and automatically screen out any inappropriate content. You can build serious social momentum this way, as UGC tends to perform six times better than typical brand-related content in terms of engagement and conversions.
You can inject social proof into more traditional marketing campaigns as well. Feature real user content like reviews, photos, videos, and social posts in emails to take open rates, clickthroughs, and engagement up to a whole new level.
Let your loyal customers do the talking to prospects and leads by spotlighting their stories, experiences, and brand sentiments. You get to build more solid credibility and trust with prospective customers this way. And UGC tends to lift conversion rates up 10% better compared to stock imagery of your products.
Tagbox will help you build out personalized messages and even assist with common email pushes like win-back campaigns and abandoned cart recovery.
The same goes for online advertising. Spotlight UGC in your social ads to deliver timely and fresh imagery to go along with your CTAs. Bring a level of authenticity to advertising posts.
Studies show UGC in ads improves conversions by over 8.5% by showcasing real customer perspectives to make your brand more relatable. Spotlighting UGC also fosters loyalty by showing you value your community’s voices. Make customers feel heard and represented in your ads.
Now it’s simple to liven up your campaigns and make them more effective by leveraging real, human social proof.
Advanced analytics
Gain detailed performance insights around your usage of UGC in Tagbox.
Handy dashboards and reports show metrics on everything, from audience sentiment, user behavior, and most active contributors to standards like impressions, views, posts, and clicks. Monitor performance across touchpoints or zoom in on specific channels.
Graphs and charts make it easy for you and anyone else you share reports with to grasp what’s happening and what’s working.
Drill down further into visitor information, regional data, and more to get deep into the results and what they mean. And, if you’re using widgets or the Social Display, you can get metrics on how UGC delivered via those methods is performing.
Plus, you can track hashtag performance tied to campaigns or on the whole and identify top influencers associated with your brand to encourage them to keep producing the content that delivers. And, you’ll never be in the dark about whether your investment is paying off through detailed ROI information tied to UGC assets and collections.
Tagbox’s Potential Drawbacks
There isn’t a ton to complain about here, but there are some sticking points we experienced during our testing. Generally, there are gripes about functionality, but our biggest pain point was actually figuring out how much it costs to get the right blend of features and services from Tagbox.
Confusing pricing and product separation
Tagbox has separate pricing for each of its three core products: the all-in-one UGC suite, its widgets, and its unique Social Wall offering.
The problem is, the separation between some of these isn’t too clear.
For one thing, we wondered why the UGC Suite doesn’t offer a plan that includes Tagbox Widgets. In order to create a seamless experience with sourcing and reusing UGC, it seems like separating these two products is more of a way for Tagbox to make extra money than it is about segmenting features and tools for customer convenience.
Just in general, navigating Tagbox’s catalog can get confusing. All told, there are 17 different plan types on offer. Talk about being paralyzed by choice.
Social Wall and Widget pricing are public, but you need to request pricing for the UGC Suite. You can also try those two offerings for free on a 14-day free trial, but that does not extend to UGC Suite either, where your only exposure to the platform before committing to a paid plan comes in the form of a demo with sales.
It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker to have this sort of product segmentation, but we do wish that Tagbox could find a way to streamline the selection of their products for first-time customers. On top of that, bundle options would be a great convenience to offer users that know they won’t get enough just from the UGC Suite on its own.
UI issues
A few things struck us (and real users, as noted in reviews of theirs that we analyzed) as suboptimal in terms of using Tagbox itself.
On our side of things, we had troubles from the get-go. Creating an account took longer than it needed to because the transition screen after clicking the Free Trial button took a couple minutes to load at all. Then, we had trouble logging in until we used an incognito session in Chrome, which seemed odd.
Navigating between the three different products was cumbersome instead of cohesive. This just underscores the need for Tagbox to create tighter integration between their core offerings.
And the UGC Suite itself sported an underwhelmingly sparse interface. We thought that Tagbox could do a better job in the UI/UX department, since their core service revolves around organizations’ ability to leverage UGC for that same purpose.
Users of Tagbox had some bones to pick, as well. Multiple reviews cite problems with key social media integrations like Instagram, which continuously disconnects and requires users to repeatedly reconnect accounts. This disrupts workflows and creates headaches. Similarly, some people reported bugs with Tagbox’s API integrations that severely limits the ability to extend the core tools.
Altogether, it’s not a ton to quibble about, but what issues we and others have noticed could mitigate Tagbox’s usefulness, especially if you’re planning to lean heavily on it to take your digital properties, events, and campaigns to the next level.
Tagbox Plans and Pricing
With three main products, Tagbox provides an array of plans for accessing the features and tools on offer. It can get awfully confusing at first glance, so we’ve broken everything down into a more digestible dissection of each offering’s price points.
UGC Suite
Tagbox’s UGC Suite is the all-encompassing platform for the management and publishing of user-generated content.
There are three plans, but each requires a quote to get pricing. The main differences between them are the features offered and the number of posts and UGC rights you’re able to retain on each.
It starts with the Team plan. Here, users can aggregate user generated content from over 20 sources and enable audiences to directly submit photos, videos, and other content through the UGC Uploader tool.
You won’t be able to download UGC, but you do get up to 200 monthly usage rights on this plan and the ability to republish them anywhere.
You’re also given access to Tagbox’s ROI calculator and detailed analytical insights. You also can have up to two collaborators on the platform.
The next step up is Business, which unlocks a whole lot more than Team. UGC rights expand to 400 per month and you can now download any assets to any device.
Expanding on Team’s allotment of 10,000 yearly retained posts, you can now hold onto up to 15,000 UGC assets per year. Collaborator access also expands to five on this plan.
Here’s the first tier where you can leverage Tagbox’s API. Build apps and other elements using your UGC collections, up to 5,000 hits. You’re also getting social sharing and access to Tagbox’s Creators Community for the first time.
The top tier is the Agency plan. Here, all the limitations melt away. You’re getting unlimited retained posts, UGC rights, API hits, and collaborators.
You also unlock the AI tagging feature we’re such big fans of, making your life easier in terms of curating and organizing UGC assets.
Support is largely consistent from plan to plan, with the only exception being Team limiting you to live chat support while Business and Agency afford you dedicated support.
You can demo any of Tagbox’s plans for its UGC Suite by reaching out to sales via the website.
Widget
For access to Tagbox’s web page and email widget, you can tap into one of four Widget plans that range from free-forever to custom-priced.
Each plan gives you manual moderation control, web themes for your widgets, and the user-facing UGC uploader. But successive plans unlock more powerful features while also giving you more room to use the widgets.
The free Startup plan is a great value. You only can use one widget at a time, but you still get access to the top five platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Airbnb, and On Site) and you’re allowed up to 2,000 views per month. As long as you’re not already dealing with massive traffic, this could suit your organization just fine.
The Startup tier also allows you to retain up to 500 posts for use in your widget. Widgets on this plan refresh feeds every six hours.
The first paid tier is Basic, which runs $39 per month when you opt for annual billing ($49 for month-to-month billing). It lets you deploy up to three widgets that are allowed access to the over 15 platforms Tagbox can pull from.
Views allowed go way up to 1 million per month, you can have a collaborator join you on this plan, and you’re getting key features like:
- Automated moderation
- Analytics
- Custom posts
- Calls-to-action
This plan also removes Tagbox’s branding from the widget for the first time. And feeds are refreshed every 30 minutes.
To unlock the email and hashtag campaign capabilities we highlighted earlier, you’ll want at least the Pro plan, which costs $79 per month when you pay for the full year up front. It goes up to $99 on monthly billing.
Beyond the access to those campaign tools, you’re also getting use of up to five widgets at the same time, unlimited monthly views of your widgets, 10,000 retained posts, and a feed refresh cycle of every 10 minutes.
There is also a custom-priced Enterprise plan that can be tailored to your exact specifications. Get more widgets, feeds, platforms, and more, plus instant feed refreshing and unlimited retained posts.
Any plan, save the Enterprise tier, can be tried out on a 14-day trial period.
Event Display
Tagbox’s unique Social Wall offering comes in a few different flavors. We’ll start by focusing on the event-exclusive set of plans for this product, which focus more on the frequency of needing to set up the Social Wall at in-person functions.
Plans start with Exclusive, which runs $149 per day. This is the option for one-time or very infrequent use of Tagbox’s Social Wall.
It allows you to set up two walls utilizing up to five feeds for an unlimited number of viewers. You get the core UGC Uploader tool, full-screen announcements, custom banners and posts, manual and automatic moderation, analytics, a profanity filter, and a whole lot more.
Basically, Exclusive gives you nearly full run of this Tagbox product for one-time use.
For more regular usage, the entry-level plan is Basic, which runs $249 per 30 days.
Your allotments are restricted here, as you only get one wall that can use up to three feeds for a maximum of 5,000 viewers. You don’t get the UGC Uploader, but you get everything else offered in Exclusive plus sentiment analysis.
The Pro plan gives you more room at the higher price of $599 per 30 days. Expand up to five walls with 10 feeds, and up to five collaborators, plus the ability to accommodate up to 25,000 viewers. This plan also gives you access to the UGC Uploader.
And, if that’s not enough for your needs, you have two options.
One is the custom-built Enterprise plan. For a custom price, you can set up a package that gives you as many walls, feeds, and allowed viewers as you’d like.
Or, if you’re an event agency that never really stops, try out Tagbox’s dedicated offering for that use case. The Event Agency Annual Plan provides a customized UGC display solution tailored for agencies managing events year-round.
You can host any number of events at once with an unrestricted toolkit specialized for high-volume usage. And, it’s easy enough to break even after a handful of events, with per-client rates usually ranging from $1,000 to $5,000.
Digital Display
Tagbox separates their Social Wall offering for persistent digital displays, such as those in brick-and-mortar stores or corporate offices.
You can start affordably on the Launch plan, which costs $79 per month when paying annually ($99 on month-to-month billing).
Here, you get the core features for leveraging UGC on your digital signage:
- One wall with up to five feeds
- Up to two screens
- Full-screen announcements
- Automated and manual moderation
- Analytics
- Custom banners, posts, and backgrounds
- Display themes
Missing here are access to the Studio and UGC Uploader, but those arrive on the next step up: the Engage plan.
Costing $159 per month on annual billing ($199 on monthly), you’re also allowed two walls, up to 10 feeds, and up to five screens. You also unlock sentiment analysis here, plus quicker feed refresh times of 10 minutes (compared to Launch’s 15-minute cycles).
From there, it’s much the same as the event-exclusive options. The penultimate plan is Professional, which runs $239 per month on annual billing ($299 when paying month-to-month). This tier gives you up to five walls, 10 screens, and 20 feeds, plus up to 10 collaborators and five-minute refresh cycles.
Beyond that is another bespoke Enterprise plan, with custom pricing, instant refreshing, and the potential for unlimited walls, feeds, and screens.
Try out any of these plans except for the Enterprise offering on a 14-day free trial.
Final Thoughts
Tagbox is a novel, incredibly useful platform. UGC is powerful marketing collateral in today’s world and we haven’t seen many other solutions provide a similar bevy of ways to access, secure, store, organize, repurpose, and reuse user-generated assets. Pricing is a bit headache-inducing, both in terms of plan selection and some price points, but the potency of this software can quickly soothe that initial pain. But, it’s simply important to judge for yourself by securing a demo of Tagbox’s UGC Suite or a free trial of its Social Wall or Widget products.
