Is the User-generated Content on Social Platforms Beneficial for Promotion? Taking Sugar-free Beverages as Evidence

. A growing number of enterprises begin to utilize user-generated content (UGC) to help build brand awareness and loyalty on social media platforms. There are already many kinds of goods like clothes and snacks which have been proved feasible to be promoted by UGC. This study attempts to analyze whether it is feasible to promote sugar free beverage products by UGC. This study uses the numbers of likes and comments from 21 live streamers and 42 sugar free beverage promotion UGC and beverage promotion UGC to be the sample. Compared by the likes of UGC about sugar free beverage and other content from same live streamers, it can prove whether sugar free beverage is a relatively hot topic in existing UGCs. Also, compared by the like/comment ratio by the hottest 21 videos with topics of sugar free beverage and beverage, it is known whether manufacturer can get higher income with certain number of plays. This study also put forward that it is important to attract more live streamers to focus on promoting new sugar free beverage products to benefit consumers, manufacturers and live streamers themselves.


Introduction
Nowadays, there are more and more types of advertising, and the most familiar ones to consumers are TV ads and online celebrities.Various advertisements can bring consumers more information about goods, but the quality of mass information varies greatly, and the content of these advertisements cannot meet the needs of consumers.In contrast, UGC can promote the property and advantages of the product from the user's point of view, and people are more inclined to believe in this form of publicity, which are two advantages that live Internet celebrities and TV ads do not have.The following literature review will explain these two advantages.
From sensory and health viewpoints, sugar reduction in beverages become a new trend [1].Many beverage manufacturers are also starting to produce sugar-free beverages to meet consumer demand.How to make the beverage sweet and tasty without the use of sucrose has become a hot issue.In the article "Low-sugar/sugar-free Health Industry Analysis", the market prospects of highpower sweeteners to enhance the sweetness of sugar-free beverages are analyzed, in which the advantages and disadvantages of several major high caloric sweeteners such as sucralose, aspartame, acesulfamil, Neotame, Edavantine, cysosweet and saccharin sodium are discussed in the practical application process8.But some articles question whether diet drinks are safe.In the article 'Are Diet sodas Really Healthy?', people who drink two or more cups of diet soda a day are more likely to die from all types of disease than those who drink less than one cup of diet soda a month so that drinking diet soda is also associated with a higher risk of death10.In general, as a new product, diet drinks have received a lot of attention and questions, and consumers' understanding of diet drinks is very limited.If high-quality manufacturers can promote their products through UGC so that consumers will be willing to buy their sugar-free beverages, then everyone will benefit.Based on this situation, this paper is devoted to studying the feasibility of UGC's promotion of sugar-free beverages.The main content of this paper is divided into three parts: Literature Review, Methodology & Discussion and Limitation & Outlook.Finally, the conclusion says that UGC's promotion of sugar-free beverages is feasible, and the feasibility is stronger than the current popular broad beverage publicity.

The trend of consumer choice under the trend of reducing sugar
In recent years, dietary standards have gradually been upgraded from low cost and convenient to diversified indicators such as health, tasty, authenticity and nature of food and beverages.Among them, healthy diet has become one of the main reference indicators so that the label-'zero sugar' has become a beverage market trend.The sugar content of drinks has become one of the reference standards for consumers to choose drinks.According to the "2023 China Diet Beverage Industry Research and Consumer Insight Report" published by Aimei Media Consulting in 2023, the market size of diet beverage in China soared from 2.26 billion yuan to 19.96 billion yuan from 2015 to 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 36.5%. Figure 1 clearly shows how fast the market has evolved over the past eight years.Under the wave of rapid market recognition of this sugar-free beverage, the article 'The influence of strategic behavior of beverage enterprises on consumer choice under the trend of sugar reduction' puts forward the following conclusions: First, zero-sugar labels such as "0 sugar 0 calories" and "added stevia glycoside" are more attractive to consumers, because in the empirical experiment of the paper, the probability of Coke with zero-sugar label is more attractive than that of Coke without zero-sugar label.Second, the strategic proposition of beverage bottle packaging will enhance consumers' sensitivity to price.Third, the older the consumer, the more health conscious, and thus the more inclined to buy sugar-free beverages.Fourth, consumers who often pay attention to food packaging are more inclined to buy diet drinks such as diet cola [2].

User-generated content (UGC)
With the development of Internet technology, the functions of social platforms are constantly improving.For example, Instagram, Tiktok and other software realize big data analysis of consumer tendencies and consciously push their favorite content to consumers [3].On this basis, user-generated content can be pushed to consumers in a targeted way as the target audience is given the possibility of digital content creation and discussion in forums and social networks [4].UGC has three characteristics: (1) it can be obtained in certain publicly accessible environments, such as the Internet; (2) It reflects some degree of creative effort; (3) It is created by the practices and conventions of free, external brands.Thus, adaptation and appropriation of advertising messages and storytelling by non-professionals unrelated to the brand is one of the ways in which UGC is generated [5].

The advantages of utilizing UGC to promote goods
As consumer-oriented original content, UGC has a stronger ability to gain the trust of consumers.Compared with official media promotion and influencer marketing, UGC promotion can obtain more comments and more frequent interactions [3].What's more, Goh, Heng and Lin demonstrate that consumer will have higher probability to increase expenditure on the goods if they join in brand communities [6].In general, UGC can not only make the trademark more trusted, but also make the interaction of the product promotion more frequent, which is more likely to increase the revenue of the manufacturer.

Data collecting and analysis
The data from the first set of experiments are shown in the following Table 1 and Figure 2.  The last row in the table is the sum of the average number of likes of the 21 live streamers' diet drink videos and the sum of the average number of likes of other content, and it can be found that the former is 4.44 times that of the latter.This proves that diet drink video content is more popular with viewers.In line with consumer preferences under the trend of sugar reduction.
The data of the second set of experiments are shown in the Table 2.The last row of the table clearly shows that the ratio of the number of likes and comments of the videos of diet beverage content is 95.64% of that of the videos of other beverage content.The difference between the two is less than 5%, and the difference is not obvious.Assuming that the two groups of data conform to the normal distribution, through the T test, it is also found that the two groups of data planes are significantly different.Therefore, the video content of diet drinks does not have a lower ratio of likes and comments, and in order to get more comments, UGC content of diet drinks needs to have the same number of views as other kinds of beverage promotion videos.
Above all, it is not difficult to conclude that when the video content is related to sugar-free drinks, the popularity of the video is relatively high, so the label of diet drinks is very attractive to consumers.The use of UGC to promote sugar-free drinks as a commodity must be more effective than other beverages.UGC is more feasible to promote sugar-free beverage products than UGC is to promote other kinds of beverage products.

Discussion
Matthew O. Jackson mentioned that the game spreads quickly to everyone when there is clustering [7].It means that the ideas will spread quicker when clustering coefficient bigger.Fortunately, Tiktok and Instagram can attract more people with similar interest together to discuss and share more information.This brings bigger clustering coefficient than traditional methods to spread the information of new goods.Moreover, the higher credibility of UGC means that each transmission has a higher chance of getting the other party to accept a new idea, which also prompt more people to be willing to buy new sugar-free beverage without doubt than corporate official media and network celebrity marketing.From social network perspective, UGC is a better way to spread information than the former traditional ways.Also, sugar-free beverage can have higher probability than other types of beverages to attract new consumers to be willing to consumption.

Present and potential Limitations
Nowadays, there are also some researchers question that the sugar-free beverage may also cause damage on human body, Expert holds that it also leads to a higher risk of death and '2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines' all question that sugar-free product may have negative effect to human-beings [8][9][10].Especially in the third article, it recommends limiting intakes of free and added sugars to a maximum 10% of energy.These articles means that Sugar free products may have risks to consumers, which will unavoidably effect somebody give up their idea to expand their expenditure to purchase sugar free product so that the sugar free beverage.If there have convincingly evidence demonstrate that sugar free product should be banned, the manufactures should have to close their factories.In a word, the producers are also facing the risk of collapse.

Outlooks
In previous study, the 21 live streamers this study chosen are all focus on broader topics, that means they do broader content for their most UGC.On major social platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok, almost no live streamers are dedicated to UGC creation of sugar-free drinks.It is not difficult to find that the label of sugarfree drinks is very hot, and consumers have a stronger preference for goods with the "sugar-free" label.Other topics such as diet food and quadratic element clothes, these goods are all also be the subset of food and clothes with interesting labels.However, there are some live streamers such as 'Everyday diet food' and 'unusual tiny pig' only focus on these contents.The contradiction between the lack of streamers dedicated to sugar-free beverage content and the high popularity of this product means that UGC's promotion of sugar-free beverage products may not be conducive to the high income of streamers in the long run.While thinking about how to rely on UGC to promote the popularity of beverages with sugar-free labels, enterprises and anchors should also think about how to enable anchors to focus on promoting sugar-free beverages, and obtain higher income, attract more high-traffic live streamers to help enterprises promote sugar-free beverages and achieve sustainable development.It will both benefit the live streamers and the producers if there will have more live streamers only do UGCs only focus on sugar-free beverage.

Conclusion
This study analyzes the feasibility of using UGC to promote sugar-free beverage products.The previous studies find that UGC do have advantages to attract new customers to buy goods and the sugar-free label is becoming more and more popular nowadays.Due to these ideas, the study uses two experiments with 21 samples from Tiktok proved that beverage with sugarfree label is more attractive than other beverage products, which means that the feasibility for enterprises to rely on UGC to promote sugar-free beverage is better than promote beverage with no specific labels.However, It may not be profitable to do promotion only related to sugar-free beverage for live streamers so that there is merely live streamers contribute to do sugar-free beverage promotion.In a word, UGC is a very efficient method for producers to promote new sugar-free beverage and it is feasible.People should also find the feasible ways to attract more live streamers to focus on sugar-free beverage and make both live streamers and producers benefit from it.

3. 1
Experiment designAmong the current major social platforms such as Tiktok, Instagram and Bilibili, which create chances for individuals to share their own content such as experience, music and ideas, Tiktok has the most UGC recommending sugar-free drinks.Since objective factors such as different popularity of different platforms and different audience groups will lead to different popularity of videos related to diet drinks on different platforms, this paper only uses data from Tiktok for follow-up research.There are two sets of experiments in the paper.The first set of experiments uses the average number of likes of 21 anchors' diet drink videos and the average number of likes of other videos as samples.The more likes, the higher the popularity of the videos.The second set of experiments used 21 videos with the highest volume of diet beverage content and 21 videos with the highest volume of other beverage content as samples, and compared the average number of likes to the number of comments of 21 videos.A lower ratio means that fewer likes lead to more potential revenue.In the first group of experiments, the 21 anchors were weight loss and food evaluation anchors corresponding to the 21 videos with the highest playback volume recommended after entering keywords diet drinks into the search engine.In the second group of experiments, the 21 diet drinks recommendations and beverage recommendation videos with the highest playback volume on the Douyin platform were also selected by entering keywords diet drinks and beverages into the search engine.

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. Average number of likes for sugar-free beverage & other content of 21 live streamers (Photo/Picture credit: Original).

Table 1 .
Average number of likes for sugar-free beverage and other content of 21 live streamers and total number of likes for sugar-free beverage and other content.

Table 2 .
Number of likes and comments of sugar-free beverage and other beverage and likes/comment ratio.