UGC Rights And Reuse

A customer posting a photo of your finished work is worth more than anything you can produce yourself, because it is obviously real.

Which is why it gets reposted immediately, usually without asking, and occasionally with consequences.

Posting it does not give you rights

The person who took the photo owns the copyright in it. Tagging you, posting it publicly, or using your hashtag does not transfer that.

A platform's terms give the platform a licence. They do not give you one. Which means a repost to your own feed, a crop into an ad, or a print of it on a brochure are three increasingly risky uses of somebody else's work.

The risk is low for a simple story repost with credit. It rises sharply the moment the content is used in paid advertising, on a website, or in print.

Ask, and ask specifically

One message, and it takes thirty seconds.

"Love this, can we share it on our feed and in our advertising, with credit to you?" The answer is almost always yes, and now you have it in writing in a thread you can find later.

Specific matters. Permission to repost on a feed is not permission to run it as an ad. Say what you want to do with it, including advertising and the website, so you are not back asking again when the useful opportunity arrives.

Keep the record

A spreadsheet or a folder, with the file, the date, who gave permission, what they permitted, and a screenshot of the message.

Which sounds bureaucratic until the one time somebody asks, or until the person who got the permission leaves and nobody can remember whether the photo in the ad was cleared.

Any asset without a record does not go in paid media. That is the only rule that holds.

People in the frame need their own permission

The photographer owns the image. Anybody identifiable in it has a separate interest in how their likeness is used, particularly in advertising.

Which means a customer photo with their family in it needs their agreement to that use, not only to the repost. On a trade or construction job, a photo with a worker in it needs the same consideration, and it is far easier to ask on the day than afterwards.

Children in the frame raise the bar substantially. The practical answer in advertising is usually to choose a different photo.

Built environment and third party content

A photo of a finished project may contain things that are not yours: another trade's work, a product brand, a neighbouring property, a piece of art, a signwritten vehicle.

Mostly fine for a social repost. Worth a look before it becomes an ad or a hero image, because an identifiable third party brand in your advertising is a different conversation from one in a customer's snapshot.

The simple version: if the photo is selling your work and something else in it is doing the selling, check.

Reviews are not photos

Written reviews carry their own rules. A review is the reviewer's words, and reproducing it is generally fine with attribution as written.

What is never fine is editing it, combining two of them, moving the attribution to a different person, or writing one. The whole asset only works because it is real, and the moment one is fabricated the entire wall of them is worthless.

Make the content easier to get

Businesses that get a lot of customer content do three things.

They ask. At handover, directly: if you post it, tag us, and we would love to share it.

They make it worth doing, usually by sharing it well. People post more when the repost looked good and credited them properly.

They respond to everything, because an account that engages gets tagged and an account that ignores its mentions does not.

What to do with it once you have it

Customer content performs differently from produced content, and the instinct is to tidy it up. Resist it.

The imperfection is the point. A straight phone photo of finished work in a real house, with the customer's own words next to it, outperforms a styled version of the same thing. Which is also why it belongs in paid media, where it consistently outperforms polished creative in service categories.

What this unlocks: the most persuasive asset in your category, used in advertising, with the rights to prove it.