Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/9-ways-leverage-social-proof-without-looking-like-idiot/130667/
Social proof, such as customer reviews and testimonials, can greatly improve your business by creating trust among your customers.
Here are 9 ways to get more social proof:
- Get customer testimonials. Reach out to satisfied customers and ask them for short testimonials. Give free products to journalists, regular users, or brand influencers in exchange for honest reviews. Include details such as names, company, job position, and headshots to boost credibility of testimonials. Embedded tweets and video testimonials are also great options.
- Increase your credibility by borrowing other people’s credibility. Get your brand mentioned or featured on trusted websites or blogs. This can be done by guest blogging, getting in touch and building lasting relationships with other businesses, as well as traditional PR.
- Get celebrities or industry experts to endorse your company as these people are highly trusted by customers.
- Associate your brand with well-known companies and experts. This can be done by cohosting webinars or doing interviews.
- Use case studies to show that your products really work.
- Show the number of times your content has been shared. Some tips on boosting your share numbers include combining the total count for various social media platforms, as well as paid promotion.
- Also show how many your followers are. Number of followers can also be boosted by combining total count.
- Display statistics that are important and relevant to your company, like total software downloads or total number of customers.
- Add trust seals on your checkout pages as these enhance the trustworthiness of business transactions with your company.