How to Use User Generated Content in WordPress to Grow Your Business

Did you know that user-generated content can tremendously help you grow your business?

User generated content is both relatable and authentic, that’s why it’s a big winner with millennials and Gen Z. This helps to build trust from potential buyers, increasing your conversion rates.

In this article, we will show you how to easily use user-generated content in WordPress to grow your business.

What is User-Generated Content?

User generated content (UGC) is the content generated by user activities on your website. This includes comments, testimonials, guest blog posts, user reviews, or any other user submitted content that is publicly visible and was a direct result of user action.

Why is user generated content important?

User generated content is important because it enables your users to directly take part in activities on your website. This boosts user engagement and brand loyalty as users spend more time on your website.

Consumers are 2.4 times more likely to perceive user-generated content as authentic compared to branded content. Authenticity is a huge driver for building trust, as consumers are more likely to support brands that are honest and transparent in their marketing approach.

High-quality and useful user-generated content can help you plan an effective content marketing strategy. You can get more traffic, affiliate sales, and social reach to a wider audience.

That being said, let’s take a look at different ways to use user-generated content in WordPress. You can use all of them or just the ones that works best for you.

1. Comments

Comments are the easiest kind of user-generated content that every blog can have. WordPress comes with a built-in commenting system that is enabled on all your blog posts by default.

If you run a business website with no blog, then perhaps you should think of starting a WordPress blog. You can keep your existing website design and just add a separate blog page to it.

The tricky part is to get your users to comment. Most users usually leave without writing a comment. However, the good news is that there are a lot of ways to encourage more comments. See our article on how to get more comments on your blog posts.

2. Testimonials

Testimonials not only help generate content, but they also add social proof to your website which helps new users into buying.

For a small business website, testimonials have proven to be a very effective marketing strategy. This is why you see them all around the web.

There are several great testimonials plugins that help you easily add testimonials to your site. You can collect user testimonials using a simple form and display them in a slider, sidebar widget, or on a testimonials page.

Our team behind WPForms has done an excellent job in creating a WPForms review page that shows over 2500+ user testimonials.

For detailed instructions, see our tutorial on how to easily add rotating testimonials to your WordPress site.

3. User Submitted Reviews

If you sell or recommend products/services on your website, then user reviews offer a great opportunity to add more user-generated content to your website.

Reviews not only help you keep users engaged, but they also help other users make buying decisions on your website. That’s why you see many niche reviews sites that heavily rely on user submitted reviews to make money online.

Search engines also love reviews and often highlight them differently in search results. This makes the item more noticeable in search results and brings more traffic to your site.

There are several WordPress product review plugins that you can use. You can also create a separate page for customer reviews or display your Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews to get the ball rolling.

4. Guest Posts

Guest blogging is a popular content marketing strategy that helps both the blog owner and the guest author. The guest post author gets exposure and backlinks while you get high-quality content.

The easiest way to do that would be to create a new user account for the guest author. However, this would give the guest author access to your WordPress admin area which many site owners don’t feel comfortable with.

In that case, you’ll need the WPForms Post Submissions addon. It allows you to easily accept user submitted posts on your website. These posts are then stored as drafts, which you can then review and publish.

You can also use it to create other types of user-generated blog content such as image submissions (memes, photo contests, etc).

For detailed instructions, see our article on how to allow users to submit posts to your WordPress site.

5. Build a Community

Human beings are social, and we like to interact with each other. You can provide your visitors a chance to do that on your own site by building a membership community.

You can make some of your content members-only to encourage new sign-ups. After that you can encourage discussions, reward users for participation, and even create membership levels with paid subscriptions.

The easiest way to do all that is by using MemberPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin that allows you to build online communities with powerful controls and great flexibility. You can even add it to an existing site without affecting any of your existing content.

It’s a good idea to add a forum, so users can share their thoughts, resources and questions. Just make sure you have a custom user registration form, so that users can sign up and join your community.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to make a membership website in WordPress.

6. Host a Giveaway

One way to drum up excitement among your blog readers and boost loyalty is to host a giveaway.

You can ask customers for user-generated content in order for a chance to win free prizes.

For example, let’s say you own an online store. You can ask customers for pictures or videos of them wearing your clothing. All they have to do to enter into the giveaway is to share a picture or post it on social media and tag your brand.

If you can offer a great prize such as a special edition sneakers or brand new headphones, you’ll watch those images pour in as new people enter.

When creating giveaways, make sure to state specific content guidelines such as image quality and have them clearly showcasing your brand within the image.

We recommend using a plugin like Rafflepress. It’s the best WordPress giveaway plugin, since it’s user friendly and allows you to create contests in just a few clicks.

For a step by step tutorial, check out our post on how to run a giveaway / contest in WordPress with RafflePress.

Bonus: Add Instagram Galleries

Your customers are likely posting content or tagging your business on social media platforms on Instagram.

Adding Instagram galleries to your site allows you to showcase what others are posting about you.

All you need is the Smash Balloon plugin, the best social media feeds plugin for WordPress, used by over 1.3 million sites.

For example, let’s say you have a WooCommerce store. You can add an Instagram gallery to your product pages, so shoppers get an authentic glimpse of what it looks like. And it helps them better picture themselves using the product.

Not to mention, it’s a great to show your social media following.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use user-generated content in WordPress to grow your business.

Now that you have users spending more time on your website, see how to easily track user engagement on your website with Google Analytics or our article on how to create an email newsletter the RIGHT way.

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