The Dynamics of Content Sharing on Social Media: From Organizational to User-Generated Content

Every time you share an article on X (formerly Twitter), post a product review on Instagram, or retweet a breaking news story with your own commentary, you are participating in one of the most defining phenomena of the digital age – content sharing on social media. This activity is no longer limited to media companies broadcasting information to passive audiences. Today, content flows in multiple directions, created and circulated by organisations and ordinary users alike. Understanding this shift is essential for anyone studying how modern media works.

What is content sharing on social media? 🔗

Content sharing on social media refers to the act of distributing, redistributing, or creating content across social networking platforms. This content can take many forms – text posts, images, videos, links to articles, memes, podcasts, and more. What makes this process distinct in the social media era is that it involves two broad categories of contributors: organisations (like news outlets, brands, and institutions) and individual users.

Unlike traditional media, where content moved in a single direction – from producer to consumer – social media enables a multidirectional flow of information. A news organisation may publish a story, which is then shared by thousands of users who add their own opinions, context, or criticism. This creates layered conversations around a single piece of content, something that was nearly impossible in the age of print newspapers or broadcast television.

Organisational content: news, analysis, and branded media 🔗

Organisations – from legacy media houses like the BBC and The New York Times to digital-native outlets like BuzzFeed and The Wire – use social media as a primary distribution channel. They share news reports, professional analyses, opinion pieces, explainers, and multimedia content across platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

For these organisations, social media serves multiple purposes. It drives traffic back to their websites, increases visibility, and helps build audience loyalty. Branded content from companies also falls into this category – think of a company posting behind-the-scenes videos, infographics, or thought leadership articles on LinkedIn.

The key characteristic of organisational content is that it is typically professionally produced. It goes through editorial processes, fact-checking (in the case of journalism), and strategic planning. However, once it enters the social media ecosystem, the organisation loses control over how that content is received, interpreted, and redistributed by users.

How organisational content behaves on social media 🔗

When a news organisation shares an article on Facebook or X, the content enters a dynamic environment. Users may share it with supportive commentary, critique it, add context from their own experience, or remix it into memes and satirical posts. This transforms what was originally a one-way piece of communication into a collaborative, evolving conversation. The original article becomes just one node in a much larger network of discourse.

This is why social media managers at news organisations pay close attention not just to what they publish, but to how audiences engage with it. Research from Statista shows that user-generated interactions with branded or organisational content significantly shape its reach and impact, making audience engagement a critical metric.

User-generated content: the rise of the everyday creator 🔗

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content – text, images, videos, reviews, comments – created and published by individuals rather than professional organisations. This includes everything from a student’s Instagram story about campus life to a citizen’s live video of a protest, or a customer’s detailed product review on YouTube.

UGC is now a massive part of the social media landscape. According to Statista’s social media data, global social media penetration reached 62 percent in 2024, with billions of users actively creating and sharing content daily. The sheer volume of UGC dwarfs what professional organisations can produce, making individual users a dominant force in the information ecosystem.

The types of UGC are diverse. They include personal reflections and opinions on blogs or social platforms, photos and videos shared on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, reviews and ratings on e-commerce sites and Google, citizen journalism and eyewitness reporting, and creative works like fan fiction, remixes, and memes.

Why UGC matters 🔗

UGC matters because it carries a high degree of perceived authenticity. Research compiled by inBeat Agency indicates that consumers are significantly more likely to view user-created content as authentic compared to brand-produced material. This perception of trustworthiness makes UGC a powerful force – not just in marketing, but in journalism, politics, and public discourse.

When an earthquake strikes and the first footage comes from a resident’s smartphone rather than a TV crew, that is UGC reshaping how news is reported. When a viral TikTok video draws attention to a social issue before any mainstream outlet covers it, that is the power of user-generated content at work.

Participatory culture: Henry Jenkins and the shift from audience to participant 🔗

The theoretical foundation for understanding this shift comes from media scholar Henry Jenkins. In his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins introduced the concept of participatory culture – a cultural environment in which audiences are no longer passive spectators but active participants in the creation and circulation of media content.

Jenkins argued that the traditional separation between media producers and media consumers was dissolving. In a participatory culture, people interact with media content according to a new set of rules – they remix, redistribute, comment on, and create new content in response to what they consume. This is a fundamental departure from the broadcast model of the 20th century, where a small number of producers controlled what millions of people watched, read, or listened to.

A central idea in Jenkins’ work is convergence culture itself – the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between different media industries, and the active behaviour of audiences who seek out content across various channels. Jenkins emphasised that convergence is not primarily a technological process. It is a cultural shift driven by the active participation of consumers who now have the tools to create and share media on their own.

Collective intelligence and shared knowledge 🔗

Another important dimension of Jenkins’ framework is collective intelligence, a term he borrowed from French theorist Pierre Lévy. The idea is straightforward: no single person can know everything, but collectively, communities can pool their knowledge and skills to make sense of complex information. Social media platforms are a natural environment for this kind of collective sense-making.

Consider how Twitter users collectively fact-check political claims in real time, or how Reddit communities crowd-source investigations and research. These are examples of collective intelligence in action, made possible by the participatory architecture of social media.

Prosumers: when consumers become producers 🔗

The blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers has a name that predates social media. In 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumer” in his book The Third Wave. Toffler predicted that as society moved beyond the industrial age, the rigid distinction between those who produce goods and services and those who consume them would gradually dissolve. People would increasingly participate in both activities simultaneously.

Toffler’s concept was ahead of its time. As researchers have noted, the advent of digital technologies and social media platforms has dramatically accelerated the prosumer phenomenon. When you write a detailed Google review, create a YouTube tutorial, or post a thread on X explaining a complex topic, you are operating as a prosumer – consuming information and platforms while simultaneously producing content that others will consume.

In the context of social media content sharing, the prosumer concept helps explain why the line between “audience” and “media” has become so blurry. Every social media user is, to some degree, both a consumer and a producer of content.

Produsers and produsage: Axel Bruns’ contribution 🔗

While Toffler’s “prosumer” concept laid important groundwork, Axel Bruns, a media scholar at Queensland University of Technology, argued that it did not fully capture the collaborative, community-driven nature of online content creation. In 2006, Bruns introduced the concept of “produsage” – a blend of “production” and “usage” – and the corresponding figure of the “produser.”

According to Bruns’ framework, produsage describes a mode of content creation where users are continuously and collaboratively building, extending, and improving shared content. Unlike Toffler’s prosumer, who was essentially a well-informed consumer participating in market processes, the produser is actively involved in creating shared knowledge resources – think of Wikipedia editors, open-source software contributors, or citizen journalists collaborating on news stories.

Four principles of produsage 🔗

Bruns identified four key principles that define produsage environments:

Open participation and communal evaluation – Anyone can contribute, and the community collectively assesses the quality of contributions. There are no strict gatekeepers deciding who gets to participate.

Fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy – Leadership in produsage communities is not fixed. It shifts based on who is making the most valuable contributions at any given time. This creates flexible, non-hierarchical structures.

Unfinished artefacts in a continuing process – Content produced through produsage is never truly “finished.” A Wikipedia article, for example, is always open to revision, expansion, and improvement. Bruns describes this as a palimpsestic quality, where content is continuously rewritten and layered over time.

Common property and individual rewards – The outputs of produsage are typically shared as common property (often under open licences like Creative Commons), while individual contributors gain recognition and status within the community.

Produsage vs. prosumption: a key distinction 🔗

The distinction between prosumers and produsers is important. As Bruns has argued, Toffler’s prosumer model remains grounded in industrial-age thinking – the prosumer is still fundamentally a consumer, just a more active and informed one. The produser, by contrast, operates in a genuinely collaborative environment where the roles of producer and consumer are so deeply intertwined that the distinction becomes meaningless.

On social media, both dynamics coexist. When you passively scroll through your feed and occasionally share or react to posts, you are closer to the prosumer model. When you actively contribute to a collaborative thread, co-create content with others, or participate in building shared knowledge (like editing a community wiki or contributing to an open-source project), you are engaging in produsage.

The multidirectional flow of content 🔗

One of the most significant consequences of these shifts is that content on social media flows in multiple directions simultaneously. In the traditional media model, content moved from a small number of producers to a large audience – a one-to-many broadcast. Social media has transformed this into a many-to-many model.

An organisation publishes an article. A user shares it with their own commentary. Another user responds with a counter-argument. Someone else creates a meme based on the headline. A journalist from another outlet picks up the conversation and writes a follow-up story. This multidirectional flow means that content is no longer static – it evolves, mutates, and takes on new meanings as it moves through networks of users.

This has profound implications for how information spreads. Viral content, misinformation, trending topics, and online movements are all products of this multidirectional flow. Understanding it is critical for anyone working in journalism, communications, marketing, or media studies.

The spectrum of content sharing: from passive to active 🔗

Not all content sharing is equal. It exists on a spectrum of participation. At one end, there is passive sharing – simply clicking a “retweet” or “share” button with no added commentary. At the other end, there is active, creative participation – producing original content, writing detailed analyses, creating multimedia responses, or collaborating on shared projects.

Most social media users operate somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They share links, add brief opinions, react with emojis, and occasionally create original posts. But the infrastructure of social media platforms is designed to encourage movement toward the more active end of the spectrum – through features like Stories, Reels, Threads, comment sections, and collaborative tools.

This spectrum is what makes the concepts of participatory culture, prosumers, and produsers so valuable for analysis. They give us a vocabulary to describe the different levels of engagement that users bring to the content-sharing process.

Challenges and criticisms 🔗

The participatory culture framework is not without its critics. Some scholars point out that the reality of social media is far less democratic than Jenkins’ optimistic vision suggests. Platform algorithms determine what content gets seen and what gets buried. Large corporations and wealthy individuals can amplify their messages in ways that ordinary users cannot. And the labour of content creation by ordinary users often benefits platform companies (through advertising revenue) more than the users themselves.

There are also concerns about the quality of UGC. While citizen journalism and user-generated reporting can fill important gaps, they can also spread misinformation, lack editorial oversight, and amplify biases. The same participatory tools that empower individuals can also be weaponised for disinformation campaigns.

These are important critiques to keep in mind. Participatory culture and produsage are powerful analytical frameworks, but they describe possibilities – not guarantees – of a more democratic media landscape.

What do you think? Has the shift toward participatory culture genuinely empowered ordinary users, or has it primarily benefited the platforms and corporations that host our content? And in your own social media use, where do you fall on the spectrum between passive consumer and active produser?

References

1. https://www.statista.com/topics/1716/user-generated-content/
2. https://www.statista.com/markets/424/topic/540/social-media-user-generated-content/#overview
3. https://inbeat.agency/blog/ugc-statistics
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-07555-0_6
5. https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/jenkins-on-collective-intelligence-and-convergence-culture
6. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8392/4/3/82
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produsage
8. https://snurb.info/produsage
9. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/27370/