Cloudinary Blog

Did you know that five billion users of the top five social apps post 41.6 million messages a minute? Or that three billion JPEG images are created every day?

Not only does this tremendous volume of peer-to-peer activity profoundly affect our social lives, it has also revolutionized the way shoppers navigate the purchase journey. How? By reading unbranded feedback and the like from other users, shoppers can avoid marketing hype and make purchase decisions based on what they often consider to be objective, honest opinions on the merchandise.

However, along with the benefits of user-generated content (UGC), comes myriad technical challenges. Content must be moderated to avoid compromising your brand. You need to provide a user-friendly process to efficiently manage content uploads. You need to transform images and videos to ensure brand consistency and web performance. You also need to ensure they look presentable across all devices and browser environments. To help brands address these issues and more, we recently ran a three-part blog series on UGC.

How we browse online in our quest of information has largely been an unknown factor since the Internet became ubiquitous in the mid-1990s. What’s indisputable is that we’re unlikely to type in URLs as a start, especially if we don’t have clues as to which site to visit. Google search revolutionized the ability to find relevant information through keyword entries, leading to the emergence of search-engine optimization (SEO), whereby you as site owners ensure that the popular keywords appear in your content.