UGC creators vs influencers: which does your brand need?

The names make these sound like two kinds of person. They're really two kinds of purchase, and the same creator can sell either. The question is what you're paying for: content you'll publish yourself, or a post to an audience someone else has built.

UGC stands for user-generated content: originally, posts real customers made without being asked. Paid UGC borrows the look of those posts. A UGC creator films a demo, an unboxing, a before and after or a straight-to-camera recommendation, and hands you the files. You post them on your account, put them on product pages or run them as ads.

So their own audience is beside the point. A UGC creator with 400 followers can be exactly right if they're convincing on camera, deliver on time and can shoot ten opening lines for you to test. You judge a portfolio, not a profile.

The name hides one rule worth knowing: paid UGC is still an endorsement, and the person in it has to mean it. The FTC's answers on endorsements say you can't talk about your experience with a product you haven't tried, and if you've only tried it once you can't suggest you use it regularly. They add that an ad featuring a paid endorser is usually misleading unless the connection is made clear. So send the product early, and never script experiences the creator hasn't had.

This is what the other word in the title usually means: a creator who posts to their own followers. You pay for the post, but mostly for the audience, people who chose to follow this person and take their recommendations seriously. The content lives on the creator's account, with real comments under it.

Here audience fit is everything. A beautiful video shown to the wrong followers sells nothing, so you judge who follows, where they are, how many watch a typical post and how they respond. The label matters more here too. The ASA's guide to making clear that ads are ads notes that content on a brand's own channels is often already clearly advertising in that context. A post on a creator's account isn't, so it needs a clear label: see disclosing paid posts on Instagram and TikTok.

Neither has a going rate, so these numbers are made up to show the method.

An audience post is priced on the audience. Divide the fee by the median views of the creator's recent posts and multiply by 1,000. A £400 TikTok from a creator whose videos get a median of 20,000 views costs £20 per 1,000 views, which you can check against your break-even. See paying TikTok and Instagram creators.

UGC is priced per asset, and the views come from your ad budget. A UGC video has no views until you pay for them. Say a creator charges £250 for a video with 90 days of paid usage, and you spend £1,500 running it. The real cost is £1,750, and at £15 profit per sale it needs about 117 sales to break even. Compare the £250 with what it would cost you to make an ad that good, not with an audience creator's fee.

The expensive mistake is mixing the two up: paying an audience fee for a video you'll only ever run as an ad, or paying a UGC fee and expecting sales from a post to a few hundred followers.

The line between the two is drawn in the agreement, by what you may do with the content:

• A post on the creator's account. The default for an audience deal, and nothing more.
• Reposting on your own accounts, with credit, for a set period.
• Paid ads from the creator's handle. On TikTok that's a Spark Ad, which the creator authorises for a period you agree. On Instagram it's a partnership ad, which needs the creator's permission for one post or their whole account, and which they can withdraw.
• Paid ads from your own account, and the raw files. The full UGC package: footage you can cut, caption and run as you like.
• Exclusivity, territory and duration for each of the above.

The further down that list, the more you're buying content rather than audience, and the more it should cost. See Spark Ads and partnership ads for the setup.

Our position, plainly: for a brand that isn't already spending steadily on paid social, UGC is content with nowhere to go. A folder of good videos sells nothing until you pay to show them. For that brand we'd start with creators whose audience fits.

Choose UGC when

You already run ads and fresh creative is the bottleneck. You need many versions to test, videos for product pages, or full control of the script.

Choose creators with an audience when

Few people know your brand yet, your budget can't carry ad spend on top of fees, or you sell to a community, such as home baristas or trail runners, that already follows particular creators. One post brings reach, credibility and real comments.

Choose the hybrid when

You want both. Pay a creator with a fitting audience for a post plus a short window of Spark Ads or partnership ads. See which posts do well with their own audience, then extend the window only for those and put your ad spend behind them.

The hybrid is what we'd recommend to most small brands: it tests creative on a real audience before you spend on ads.

Nakodo finds creators by their audience. It scores each from 0 to 100 on how closely their posts match your brief, whether their following fits your size range and markets, how their audience engages and how recently they post. Then it emails the best fits, or the ones you pick, on your behalf, and introduces you to the ones who say yes. That makes it a tool for the second kind of deal, and for the hybrid that starts from it.

It isn't built for hiring pure UGC producers. It doesn't look at portfolios or judge anyone's delivery on camera, and a UGC creator with a small account would likely fall outside your follower range or score low on audience fit, as it should. If UGC is what you need, a casting call on your own channels is a better start. If you want creators whose followers already look like your customers, here's how Nakodo works.