How to Promote User-Generated Content

TL;DR:

• User-generated content (UGC) is more trustworthy than branded content and can help build trust and credibility.
• Promoting UGC is cost effective, can increase your reach, and drive higher engagement.
• Warmly's success with UGC showcases the impact of promoting authentic content from their community.
• Steps to promoting UGC include identifying high-value content, getting internal teams to boost posts, incorporating UGC into your content strategy, and tracking engagement for warm outreach.
• Leveraging UGC is a scalable and cost-effective way to expand your reach and strengthen trust with prospects.

People trust people, not faceless brands.

User-generated content (UGC) is even more trustworthy, since it's endorsement from satisfied partners and customers rather than from the brand itself.

If you want UGC to really move the needle, you need to make sure that these posts are getting seen — in other words, you need a proper distribution or promotion strategy.

Why Promote UGC?

Before diving into the “how,” let’s discuss why promoting UGC is so important:

It Builds Trust and Credibility

UGC features real customers and partners sharing their experiences with your product. Prospects are more likely to trust content created by other users rather than content coming directly from your brand.

Increases Your Reach

When your customers or partners create content, they tap into their own networks, pushing your brand to thousands more prospects.

Drives Higher Engagement

UGC often feels more relatable than branded content, which leads to higher engagement rates. By promoting UGC, you increase visibility and create opportunities for more conversations.

Cost-Effective

UGC typically costs you nothing, as the content is created by your users.

Warmly’s Success with UGC: A Case Study

Alan Zhao, co-founder and Head of Marketing at Warmly, recognized that it was essential that the company invested time in building and serving a community of buyers on the platform.

Cold outbound and ads is no longer a viable long-term strategy for companies. In fact, Alan believes these kinds of efforts actively hurt businesses and their reputations online.

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Warmly partnered with Letterdrop to amplify UCG, allowing Alan to seamlessly promote their posts through features like automated likes and comments.

This helped his team reach thousands more prospects while strengthening relationships with influencers.

Impact:

• Warmly now averages 10,000 impressions per LinkedIn post, doubling to 20,000 impressions when they make a strong push, all without additional costs beyond their Letterdrop subscription.
• Given LinkedIn’s average ad cost of $6 per 1,000 impressions, Warmly saves more than $60 per post on advertising.

This authentic give-and-take relationship has allowed Warmly to build pipeline and expand their influence across LinkedIn.

Alan explains,

"Five times I'll boost [the influencer's] stuff so that the one time I ask them to promote one of our product launches, they'll do it."

4 Steps to Promoting UGC

1. Identify High-Value UGC

Not every piece of user content is worth promoting.

Focus on posts that highlight your product’s value, showcase customer success stories, or demonstrate real-world use cases.

The best way to keep on top of this is by finding and monitoring keywords on your platform of choice — with LinkedIn premium, you can even save keyword searches and set up alerts.

2. Get Your Internal Team and Partners to Boost Posts

Getting as many team members and partners as possible to like and comment on UGC posts can help reach thousands of prospects across multiple networks.

Lots of companies incentivize social selling internally with leaderboards, or otherwise set up a workflow to remind teams to engage.

With tools like Letterdrop, you can automate likes, reposts, and comments from multiple company accounts, creating a “surround sound effect” that amplifies the content’s reach.

3. Incorporate UGC into Your Content Strategy

Make UGC an integral part of your content calendar.

• Share user stories across your own accounts, newsletters, and blogs, tagging relevant folks to generate more engagement and conversations in the space
• Thank contributors and tag them when you see your brand mentioned
• Repost UCG on brand accounts

This not only keeps UCG content visible, but also builds goodwill within your online community.

4. Track Engagement and Use it for Warm Outreach

The final step in promoting UGC is turning engagement with these posts into active pipeline.

Track who’s interacting with the posts and follow up with engaged accounts, sending them signal-focused and personalized messages based on the posts they interacted with.

This way, you prioritize warm leads that are more likely to be in market.

Our team uses Letterdrop to scrape engaged leads and segment them into lists.

Final Thoughts: Why UGC Is a No-Brainer

Promoting user-generated content is a highly scalable, cost-effective way to build trust, increase your brand’s visibility, and drive meaningful engagement. By leveraging UGC, you not only expand your reach but also strengthen the trust between you and your prospects.

Warmly’s case study demonstrates the business impact of promoting UGC, from achieving thousands of impressions to saving on ad spend—all by amplifying authentic content from their community.

If you're looking to automate the boosting of your UGC, reach out to us.