In this blog we’re going to explore why you NEED social proof and also how social media can be life-changing for you or your company.
You’ve built an awesome company and you’ve got customers or clients flocking to you and people are loving your services but you’re lacking something. What is it that you are lacking?
Social Proof and a Social Media Presence
First let’s start with Social Proof… is it really essential?
If we are being blunt then yes, without social proof you are missing out because people love to see social proof, it puts their mind at ease.
We know you’re new to this, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog so we’re going to break it all down for you.
Social proof is the influence that the actions and attitudes of the people around us (either online or in real life) have on our own behaviour.
The “proof” element is the idea that if other people are doing something (or saying something), it must be correct. Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this.
As a customer and user of services you really trust products and services that are liked by others.
You trust those with “Social Proof”.
What we mean by this is that you wouldn’t order food from a one star restaurant, would you?
You see that it has one star and immediately you associate that with it being bad.
A negative experience.
–
4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 stars⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
–
You would order from there though? Wouldn’t you.
But social proof goes further than that in our eyes. You are not going to trust someone contacting you from a company if they are nowhere to be found online!
Which is why social media presence is so important too. We will go onto that in a bit more detail later, for now it’s all about social proof.
What does it say to you if you can’t find a company online, if they have no reviews, no website, no social media? It screams dodgy to me and I’m sure you would agree. You’d take your business elsewhere
“No thanks, I’m not giving you any of my details, why should I TRUST you?”
These words would come to mind.
However, this poor company could be a legit company, they could be doing well but they’ve just lost a future customer and all of the customers that you would have told about them and all because they don’t have social proof.
“Woah, get me on this social media hype now. I’m losing valuable customers here!”
Don’t worry I’m here to help you out but firstly, let’s delve into ‘social proof’ a bit more.
Social proof is a term originally created by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book ‘Influence’. If you want an informative read and you have the time, check it out and you won’t be disappointed. As a more descriptive definition Social Proof describes a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behaviour in a given situation.
So what are some good examples of social proof?
1) Testimonials/Reviews
The more reviews you have the better, you don’t ask if you don’t get. Ask your customers to review you and more often than not you may find that they review you. If you work with other companies you could always offer a review for them if they review you and your services.
We’ve chosen to showcase this particular review to you as this is the main review above the fold of our landing page and website – the reason we’ve picked this one is because Tim Burd is very famous in the industry we work in.
He is very well known – a celebrity in our industry. This ramps our social proof up to an entire new level. If you can get celebrities or people of high status in your industry to vouch for you and your company online then it’s going to look VERY VERY good.
We recommend putting your testimonials ABOVE THE FOLD of your landing page.
Alternatively you could put a ‘Testimonial Section’ on your home page just like these examples below:
Above you see the testimonial sections that have been created for Magic Mesh‘s website and also Muscle Grab’s page. They are simple, easy to view and they get the point across without messing around. Their message is “everyone loves our product, look at our reviews”.
We have some more tips for you for your testimonials – the perfect testimonial has 5 coloured stars and a REAL photograph. Do not use stock images, they do not perform well.
Let’s take a closer look at another website we created for Titan Power.
Titan Power
Can you spot the testimonial? Can you spot the 5 stars?
2) Crowds
Above is a screenshot from our website – we are using numbers to instil trust in our prospective clients – we’ve worked with 2000+ happy clients, we’ve completed 6000+ design projects and we have 7+ years experience. This is information that may have only been available if you worked for us but now we’ve made it available to the public because it helps them have an informed decision of why they would want to work with us.
3) Other brands
Here you see 2 different screenshots one taken from a beauty website and another taken from our website. On the beauty website they list publications and places that their brand has appeared. These are well known publications that may sway you in favour of buying with them.
On our landing page is a list of companies we have worked with, some very high profile companies, having these on our website means we are making it easy for our customers and they don’t need to go and do research to see what we’ve done and whether we are trustworthy as they can see that we’ve worked with the World Health Organization and Slimfast.
4) Stamps of approval such as SSL
On the image above you can see the trust seals below the form – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Paypal etc. Putting these on your form instills trust!
Let’s take a closer look at Muscle Grab – one of our many finished projects!
On Muscle Grab’s page we have:
A testimonial ✅
5 coloured stars and a REAL photograph to accompany the testimonial ✅
SSL and Security seals ✅
We have also added some elements that help landing pages convert such as:
– One strong CTA (call to action) throughout the page.
– A button with an emoji on it, ???? this emoji performs the best!
– A guarantee to instil further trust
And much more…
So there you have it – that is Social Proof and how you can make sure your company has it! Now you know all about Social Proof let’s move onto Social Media.
Why is Social Media important?
Having a social media presence can take your company from national to global, everyone is on some form of social media whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or YouTube.
Whatever your product or service is, it’s guaranteed you can find a way to market it online.
Everyone thinks social media marketing has to take up your whole life but that’s not the case. You can have everything planned in advance by utilising social-media scheduling tools to schedule your posts and then you no longer have to spend every second of the day posting to social media.
Some examples of websites you can use include:
Hootsuite – https://hootsuite.com/
Below you can see an example of how content is scheduled using Hootsuite’s planner.
Other examples of similar websites where you can schedule content on a social media calendar and also view analytics include Social Bakers and Buffer.
If you’re new to social media and want to learn anything and everything then I recommend using some FREE websites and resources such as Udemy and Google Digital Garage to increase your knowledge.
At Landing Page Guys we are all about sharing the journey (it’s one of our core values) so we frequently post tips to our social media platforms which you can follow at the bottom of this page.
Thank you for reading this blog, I hope you’ve gained some knowledge that you can apply to your company.
Kiera Jessica Marchant.
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Marketing Executive | Landing Page Guys
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