In virtually every industry, a social media presence is a foundation upon which customer relationships can be built, leads can be converted, relationships can be formed, and loyal brand ambassadors are born. One way to catapult your social media presence to the next level is with user-generated content (UGC) like testimonials, reviews, and recommendations.
According to SearchEngineLand: "For nearly 9 in 10 consumers, an online review is equally as important as a personal recommendation."
Here are 5 ways that using this kind of positive UGC will improve your social media presence.
1. Build trust
If a restaurant put a sign in the window that said "best lunch in town," would you gather all of your friends to go eat there? I wouldn't - and yet, if a friend called to tell me herself about a great lunch she had at a new restaurant in town, I'd be very likely to get my crew together to try it out.
Using testimonials on social media is kind of like that - it enables your satisfied customers to tell your prospects how wonderful your business is, so that you don't have to.
Check out this retweet from Boston's Myers + Chang. I know where I'm going for my next anniversary.
You could also use the testimonial widget from Spectoos to build trust with potential customers. The widget only shows testimonials that are connected to the social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) of the people who wrote them, so everyone who reads the testimonials will know that they are legitimate and trustworthy.
2. Grow Your Reach
By using testimonials on your social media pages, you can grow your reach because the followers and friends of those who left you reviews are likely to start following you, too. For example, software vendors are reviewed on many different sites. A Twitter account like that of @thestacklist does a phenomenal job of growing their reach by sharing reviews.
Here's a great example:
By sharing this review to their own followers, they may gain some "brownie points" with the parties involved. By using Twitter's @mentions to tag the parties involved, TheStacklist grew their reach by the 23.4K followers on xdotai, plus the 2,462 followers of vinayp10.
If they'd asked me, I would have suggested also adding a hashtag like #AI or #AIassistant to also grow their reach to all of the Tweeters interested in those topics, too, but you get the idea.
Testimonial + social media = growth hack.
3. Increase engagement and sales
Here's a personal account by a friend of a friend attesting to the value of sharing testimonials on social media (even the kind that may not be automatically attributable to this social media post).
"Yesterday, a friend left this message on the Facebook page of The Cheesecake Factory:
Last night, guess where I went to dinner?"
For many of the same reasons that sharing testimonials builds trust, it also increases sales and engagement.
For example, imagine that your company's looking for an event coordinator and you browse LinkedIn to find people in your network who have these skills. Coming across this recommendation for an event coordinator is likely to make you engage (and likely hire) with this person for your next event:
4. Raise brand recognition
Many companies look to social media to increase brand awareness. If you want a hamburger, what restaurant name comes to mind? If people want {whatever your business sells}, is yours the first name in your customers' minds?
If it's not, one way to expedite your way to TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness) is by creating a social media content calendar and publishing content, links, and testimonials that empower you to claim the top spot.
For example, if yours is a marketing agency and you want to build your as TOMA an Inbound Marketing Expert, create a content calendar all about Inbound Marketing and post regular social media updates with valuable content and positive reviews others have written about your inbound marketing skills.
By sharing others' thoughts about the quality of your inbound marketing abilities, you build brand recognition for your company through the UGC of other's kind (and true) words.
5. Gain an edge over competitors
Many companies hesitate to mention competitors in their paid advertising.... but letting users do it for you, now that is fair game. For an underdog in the video conferencing space, Zoom should consider retweeting testimonials like these (and possibly plastering them all over Times Square and Silicon Valley airports)
The social benefits of testimonials
A good customer review is about much more than the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives to the business owner. Entrusted to a savvy social marketing expert, a testimonial leveraged properly on social media can garner a competitive edge, improved brand recognition, increased growth, engagement and sales, and enhanced trustworthiness.
Use your testimonials on social media and watch the immediate improvement across all of your marketing goals and KPIs.