Why Social Proof is Important for Your Blog Posts

Social proof has been leveraged for as long as there have been people trying to sell items to a crowd, and crowds to buy them. Sometimes it’s blatant and overt, and other times it’s soft. With internet marketing, it has basically become codified.

Think about it like this: you see two restaurants, opening the same day. One of them has a line that loops around the block. The other is empty. They serve similar food, so which do you go visit?

Personally I’m a contrarian so I’d visit the empty one. But that’s more because I hate waiting in line more than I hate bad food. Most are going to choose the busy restaurant, under two assumptions. The first is that “that many people can’t be wrong.” The second is that the empty restaurant has to be doing something wrong, otherwise it would have plenty of business as well.

If you port this idea to blogs, imagine Facebook follower counts. If two marketing blogs with similar content are out there, which do you read? The post with 10 likes or the one with 300?

In reality, you can read both, and in fact the smaller one could be better, you just wouldn’t have known about it without the shares social proof can give.

Why Social Proof?

Think about your life. When you go to make a purchase - something moderate or large, like a computer part, a vehicle, or something similar - what do you do? Most people start by collecting information. They look up the options available for that product, they read reviews for that product, they ask their friends about the product options. In a Trustpilot survey of nearly 1,700 consumers, 66% said social proof increased their likelihood to buy.

Humans are social, herd animals. We trust each other to make decisions - even though we probably shouldn’t. When we see others buying a product, we assume there’s something helpful about it.

When most of the people buying that product leave positive reviews about it, we trust those reviews, and we’re more likely to buy that product ourselves. The Spiegel Research Center found that buy likelihood for a product with just five reviews is 270% higher than for one with no reviews at all - and for high-priced products specifically, reviews can improve conversions by as much as 380%.

As marketers, we can take advantage of this to get more people to convert. By showing how many people like our businesses and products, we can make others more likely to try them.

The Five Types of Social Proof

Social proof is the wisdom of the herd. But it can be divided amongst different categories. You’ve seen them all, I’m sure.

1: Friends and Family. The social proof of direct recommendations from friends, family, and anyone close enough to you that you trust their opinions over those of a stranger. Facebook loves to use this by showing you which of your friends have liked a page you’re looking at.

2: Bulk Wisdom. The social proof of the quantity of people who have purchased or used a product. McDonalds made this famous with their counter of served - long in the billions - but it’s common everywhere. Every website that shows the number of visitors to their site is using this social proof.

3: User Proof. Small-scale social proof from individuals. These are the reviews of products you see on Amazon, primarily - it can be anything from a quick review to a case study or video of personal experience with the product. In this case it’s not bulk that lends trust to the proof, it’s the earnest honesty of the review. User-generated content is trusted 50% more than other media types, according to Stackla, which makes it one of the most valuable forms of social proof available.

4: Celebrity Proof. The same as user proof, but the user in question is a celebrity or someone famous. This is why so many commercials for services and products on TV pay for celebrity endorsements. People who want to be more like their favorite celebrities will trust those endorsements and buy those products.

5: Expert Proof. The same as celebrity proof, except it’s not “this football player is endorsing this computer game” level of abstraction. Instead, it’s a person who is known for being an expert giving you their expert opinion.

Not every site will be able to use every form of social proof. Amazon, just to give you an example, rolls primarily with friends and family proof, bulk wisdom, and user proof. They don’t care about celebrity or expert proof, because they don’t need to. Conversely, web services will go with user proof and expert proof, showing testimonials and case studies and recommendations from high profile industry experts.

Leveraging Social Proof

If you can do one type or another, do so. Otherwise don’t worry about it; as long as you have something, it will benefit you.

Testimonials are some of the easiest forms of social proof to use. The idea is that a person who has used your product or service leaves a recommendation - this recommendation could be on a third party site like Yelp, Google Reviews, or Amazon, or maybe directly on your site. The results speak for themselves: WikiJob increased its conversion rate by 34% basically by adding testimonials to its landing page, and websites that use testimonials receive 45% more traffic than the ones that don’t. Obviously, you want positive testimonials, so you’ll have to solicit them - it’s a fact that users are more likely to leave a review when they’re displeased, because happy users don’t think about it. You need a system of email follow-ups to ask users if they have any customer service questions, or if they would like to leave a review.

You can leave small testimonials on landing pages and on product pages, and you can have a rotating box of them on a sidebar. You can welcome positive testimonials on third party sites as well. People who are interested in your product will find them; your goal is basically to make sure they are out there.

Reviews are like testimonials, but with less authority behind them individually and with a range of possible ratings. Typically you’ll want to basically set up a public review system, so users can come leave reviews right there on your site. Amazon is the best example of this in action; anyone can leave a review for anything. Many places now include a “verified purchaser” flag for reviewers to confirm they actually own the product - it helps stay away from false reviews. You want these in bulk, and that’s an aggregate reading, so you can address patterns in customer service or product problems. Reviews are an opportunity to reach out to those having problems and help fix them.

Endorsements are testimonials from high-profile users. Using these is a matter of putting them in a prominent position on your site. I like to send out trial versions of products or coupons for services to entice influencers into trying out what I’m offering. Anyone who uses your product can submit a testimonial, but you’re looking for those with very relevant audiences in your industry.

Whenever someone with a high level of influence leaves a review, writes a testimonial, or just writes a blog post where they mention your product, you can reach out and ask them if they would be willing to write a testimonial you can use on your site. If they do, you can then place it in a prominent position. Your homepage, your landing page, or some other very visible location will do nicely.

Use badges as indications of clients that use your service, badges of approval, seals of trust, and mentions.

• You can place badges of high profile sites and lists your site has been mentioned on, like if you have a high rating with the BBB or if you’ve been placed on the Inc 5000 list or a Forbes list.
• You can, on a similar note, post the logos of any high profile media companies that have reviewed or mentioned you. You see this a lot on crowdfunding campaigns; if your campaign has been mentioned on Wired, on TechCrunch, on the Wall Street Journal, or on any other major publication, you can include that logo. Just make sure you’re using recognizable logos, rather than logo spam from PR companies and private blog networks.
• You can place security badges, such as SSL trust seals, PayPal verification, and other recognized security certifications, on pages where security matters. They go best on payment info pages and registration pages.
• You can use the logos of high profile brands that use your service. This will depend on your actual client list, of course, but it’s very common with CRM services and marketing apps these days.

Don’t get carried away with the logos; it’s better to have five high quality badges than to have 50 badges for sites no one has ever heard of before.

You can make use of subscriber counts in two ways; through social media and through raw counts.

With raw counts, you see this used with email newsletters. People are more likely to sign up for a mailing list if they know they’re getting value out of it, and one way to know there’s value in the newsletter is by learning that thousands of others are reading it. “300,000 of your peers read our newsletter every day” is a way to get people to register. Social proof has also been shown to increase email sign-up rates by 15%, according to OptinMonster. Of course, you can’t fabricate your subscription numbers - expect a level of transparency.

With social media, you do this through social sharing buttons and follower counts displayed prominently on your site or landing pages.

You can get whole-site social proof with something like a Facebook page widget, which shares the total number of people who have liked your page and offers targeted social encouragement to users who are viewing the box - like showing their friends mixed in to the crowd if any of them already follow your page.

Likewise, you can use social sharing buttons to accumulate social share counts for your posts, which gives you a boost in getting those posts read and shared more. Remember that Facebook and Twitter have long since removed share count access from their third-party APIs, so you’ll need to use a tool that tracks and stores this data independently if visible share counts matter to you.

You can also use data as a sort of social proof, if you have a service that relies on metrics. For example, Google always shows you the number of results for a search and the time it took to run that search. A data center will show you their historical uptime. Any company can show their turnaround time for customer support. These are all elements of trust you can use to build more trust in your brand as a whole.

One thing you should always stay away from is negative social proof. Negative proof is making a claim but then trying to support it with a negative statement. The problem is not that there’s a negative thing happening, it’s that you’re trying to say it’s bad and then say that everyone is doing it. You’re giving bulk social proof to the wrong thing.

Like I said; you can’t use every form of social proof on your site. You’ll likely only fit two or three of them. Testimonials, badges, and reviews all work well together for just about everyone, and the rest can be added in if you can swing them.