Your customers may well trust strangers on the internet more than they trust you.

Not just a little more. Potentially a lot more. And the gap appears to be widening.

If your social media marketing relies heavily on polished brand content and paid influencer partnerships, recent research suggests it’s worth questioning whether that mix is still serving you. Let’s look at what the data says about consumer trust in 2025, and what options you have.

Content Overview

The Trust Collapse of Influencers

The influencer marketing industry is worth billions. But have learned to separate entertainment from purchase trust.

According to the Influencer Trust Index 2025 from BBB National Programs (surveying 3,720 US consumers), only 5% of consumers completely trust influencer content. Another 69% trust it “somewhat”, which in practice often means they’re sceptical. And 26% don’t trust influencers at all.

Compare that to general advertising, where 87% of consumers express trust (5.5% completely, 83.2% somewhat). Traditional ads are now viewed as more trustworthy than influencer partnerships, at least in this research.

The disconnect becomes even more interesting when you look at product recommendations specifically. A PartnerCentric survey of over 1,000 Americans in September 2025 asked who consumers trust most for product recommendations:

Crowdsourcing on social media: 63%
AI chatbots: 20%
Influencers: 17%

In this survey, influencers ranked last, behind asking strangers in Facebook groups, behind asking ChatGPT.

This doesn’t mean influencer marketing is dead, plenty of brands still see results. But it does suggest the landscape is more complex than “partner with influencers and watch the sales roll in.”

What Consumers Trust in 2025

If trust in influencers is declining, what can fill that gap?

Increasingly, it seems to be each other.

The Bazaarvoice Shopper Experience Index 2025 surveyed over 7,000 global consumers and found that 65% rely on user-generated content — ratings, reviews, photos, and videos from other customers — when making purchase decisions.

For Gen Z, that number jumps to 80% considering UGC crucial in their decision-making process.

Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Preference Report 2025 breaks this down further. Among social shoppers, 47% primarily trust organic sources (customer reviews plus peer recommendations), compared to 37% who trust branded content.

The pattern across multiple studies is fairly consistent: peer experiences tend to carry more weight than promotional content. And younger consumers are leading this shift — which suggests it may accelerate rather than reverse.

This isn’t necessarily a rejection of marketing altogether. It may be more a rejection of manufactured marketing. Consumers still want guidance on what to buy — they just seem to prefer getting it from people with no obvious financial stake in the recommendation.

The Authenticity Crisis Hitting Every Brand

Here’s where it gets complicated. Consumers want authentic peer content — but they’re increasingly suspicious that what they’re seeing isn’t authentic at all.

According to Bazaarvoice’s research, the single biggest frustration in the shopping journey is “knowing if reviews are real or trustworthy” — cited by 46% of consumers. And that suspicion has consequences: 97% of shoppers say they lose trust in a brand when they encounter fake reviews.

The fake review problem is widespread. Research from Feefo and the UK Competition and Markets Authority found that 80% of consumers have encountered a fake review in the past year. But only 8% feel confident they can actually spot one.

AI is adding another layer of complexity. Bazaarvoice’s authenticity crisis report from July 2025 found that 38% of consumers say they’re less likely to purchase from brands using AI-generated content. Trust in third-party verification signals dropped from 26% in 2024 to just 12% in 2025.

The upshot: consumers want authentic peer content, but they’re surrounded by content they can’t easily verify. This creates both challenges and opportunities for brands thinking about their content mix.

The UGC Hierarchy — What is the Ideal?

It’s worth thinking about user-generated content as a spectrum rather than a binary:

Tier 1: Genuine Customer Advocates
These are customers who create content about your brand without being asked, prompted, or incentivised. They share because they genuinely love what you do. This tends to be the most trusted content, and the hardest to generate artificially.

Tier 2: Solicited Real Customer Content
Reviews requested post-purchase, photos submitted through branded hashtag campaigns, testimonials gathered systematically. Still genuine customers, just prompted to share. Generally high trust, and more scalable with the right systems.

Tier 3: UGC-Style Content
Content that looks and feels like UGC but is created by brands using tools, creators, or AI to mimic the authentic aesthetic. Results vary, it can work well in some contexts, less well in others. Depending on the age of your audience, consumers are increasingly savvy at spotting the difference.

Tier 4: Polished Brand Content Only
Traditional marketing materials, professional photography, scripted copy. Still valuable for brand building, but much less effective at driving purchase decisions on social platforms if you’ve trying to pass it off as an authentic review.

Many Australian SMEs find themselves primarily in Tier 4. They know they should probably be doing more with customer content, but don’t have systems to capture it or the volume of passionate customers to generate it organically.

Here’s where your brand strategy comes in: if your customers aren’t compelled to share content about you, that’s worth examining. It may not be a content problem, it could be a brand or experience problem. The best UGC tactics in the world won’t create advocacy for a product or service that doesn’t inspire genuine enthusiasm.

How to Build Toward Genuine Advocacy

If Tier 1 is the goal, how do you move toward it? A few approaches worth considering:

Make content creation effortless. Many satisfied customers won’t share content simply because it doesn’t occur to them or feels like too much effort. Branded hashtags, clear calls-to-action at high-satisfaction moments, and simple submission processes can reduce friction.

Systematically request content post-purchase or post-service. The window after a positive experience is often when customers are most likely to share. Building reviews or photo requests into your follow-up sequences can help. Specific asks tend to work better than generic ones: “Share a photo of [product] in action” rather than “Leave us a review.”

Celebrate and amplify customer content publicly. When customers see other customers being featured, it can normalise sharing and create a positive feedback loop. Consider featuring UGC prominently on your website, in your social media, and in marketing materials.

Create products and experiences worth talking about. This sounds obvious, but it’s the foundation everything else rests on. Remarkable experiences get remarked on. Adequate ones generally don’t. If you’re struggling to generate organic advocacy, the answer may not be better UGC tactics, it might be improving what you’re actually delivering.

Diversifying Your Content Mix

Building genuine customer advocacy takes time. So what do you do while you’re working toward it?

The practical answer is to diversify.

Rather than waiting until you have a perfect stream of organic UGC, it’s often worth testing different content types to see what resonates with your audience. That might include:

Actively soliciting reviews and testimonials from existing customers (Tier 2)
Testing UGC-style content created with tools or creators (Tier 3)
Continuing to produce quality brand content where appropriate (Tier 4)
Building systems to capture and amplify any organic advocacy that does emerge (Tier 1)

Tools like Creatify can help you generate UGC-style video content at scale. We’ve incorporated this into our toolkit for clients where it makes sense. It’s proving effective for clients that can’t afford or don’t have actual advocates for their brand yet, but it’s all a part of the marketing mix and content styles. You never want to rely on just one style of creative.

The key is testing rather than assuming. Your audience might respond differently to various content types than the aggregate research suggests. The only way to know is to try different approaches, measure the results, and adjust.

If you do experiment with UGC-style content, be thoughtful about it. Audiences are increasingly good at spotting inauthenticity, and there can be real trust consequences when consumers feel deceived.

Creatify for UGC Creation – Examples

Where to From Here?

Consumers increasingly trust each other over brands and influencers, though the degree varies by audience, industry, and context.

For most businesses, the practical response is probably threefold: work on building genuine advocacy over time, diversify your content mix in the meantime, and test to see what actually works for your specific audience.

This isn’t about abandoning brand content or dismissing influencer partnerships entirely. It’s about recognising that the mix may need to evolve, and that authentic customer voices are becoming an increasingly valuable part of that mix.

Want to think through what this looks like for your business?