18 Smart Ways to Use Social Proof for Improving Your Search Results

Having social proof is one of the most important aspects of establishing and maintaining a successful marketing campaign. There are 6 kinds of social proof and these include the following:

• Expert: Expert social proof is the one when an expert in your specific field recommends your products/services or that are associated with your particular brand.
• Celebrity: Celebrity social proof is when a celebrity supports your products and services.
• User: User social proof is when the present users like to recommend your products and services depending on their experiences with your brand.
• Wisdom of the crowd: This kind of social proof happens when a large group of people are seen to endorse your product and brand.
• Wisdom of your friends: This social proof occurs when people see their friends approve theirspecific product.
• Certification: This type of social proof is when you are provided with a stamp of approval by an authoritative figure in the specific industry.

In this blog post, we will mainly focus on the use of social proof on social media to boost your marketing results online.

1. Get help from experts for your social media profiles – It is advised that you work with industry experts when it comes to running your social media profiles as they will be able to put you in the right direction and prevent you from making costly and time-wasting mistakes. The content you distribute will also be more authentic and will have immense social proof. Experts working in a reputed SEO agency have said that when an expert takes your Instagram account into consideration for posting educational content, share Instagram stories or go live, people might like your brand moreas it will create a positive impact on them.

2. Work together with experts for social media event – You may invite industry experts as guests during some social media events such as Facebook Live Video discussions or Twitter chats. These interactions may enable you to get positive influence from the experts and provide social media audiences a great opportunity to learn and hear from the experts of this specific sector.

3. Show appreciation for the nice mention – You might receive a pleasant mention, a big brand or an influencer in the specific industry which is a form of expert social identity. There are different ways of sharing social proof on social media. Here are some commonly used phrases:

• “Grateful for the mention”
• “Honored to be featured”

4. Share milestones – Another way to form social proof is by showing gratitude for your follower or user milestones. Reaching out milestones is certainly a fun-filled occasion to celebrate and a great time to be grateful to the people who have helped you to attain it.

Here are some milestones you can celebrate with youraudience:

• Reach out to X users
• Reach out to X customers
• Reaching X followers on the social media profile
• Reaching X downloads of your apps
• Anniversaries

5. Begin experimenting with micro influencer marketing – Influencer marketing is considered to be a cost-effective way for attaining celebrity social identity. This is usually much more common on Instagram as brands want to sponsor micro-influencers and people who have strong social media influence in a specific area and who are not celebrities for posting their products. Due to their greater influence on social media, these people are often considered as celebrities within the niche area. When other peoplesee them with a specific product, they would then transfer positive attributes that they find in these “celebrities” to the product.

6. Discover brand ambassadors – Social media ambassadors offer a mixture of celebrity, industry expert and user social identity based on the ambassador you may choose. They could be experts for social proof, social media influencers for celebrity social proof or passionate users for user social proof.Ambassadors might usually “wear” the ambassador badge on their social media bio and even include any branded hashtags into the relevant social media posts.

7. Deliver user-generated content – According to DubSEO experts, user-generated content is the most preferred strategy on Instagramas it helped to grow engagement and followers within six months. It is also a great way to generate user social identity. You may encourage users touse a branded hashtag or re-post social media posts of users.

8. Share love of customers for your products – If you get shout-outs on social media from your customers, then thisis a great moment for you to shout them back and show your appreciation.. The funniest way to generate user social identity is to share these shout-outs on your social media profile that show others users love for your products.

9. Use shout-outs in the content – Another way to generate user social identity with the short cuts are to use them in the content.

10. Show testimonials on the website – You can use customers’ short cuts by displaying them in the form of testimonials on your site.

11. Talk about size of customer base in the bio – If there is a large customer base, you may mention the size of your customer base in your bio. When people findthat many other people like them are using your product, then they would likely have a positive impression of your product.

Other than the size of customer base, here are a few other stats to mention:

• The countries where your customers are from or the countries where your business provides its services.
• Number of goods sold every day, week, month, or year.
• Number of recommendations given.

12. Reach friends of Facebook Page fans with Facebook ads – If you have sufficient budget for social ads, it is a good idea to create Facebook Ads and target people who have liked your Facebook page.

When defining your target audience in Facebook Ads Manager, make sure you scroll down to “Connections” and then choose “Add a connection type”. After this, select “Facebook Pages” > “Friends of people who like your Page” and finally enter the Page name in the given field. Facebook will automatically add social identityof friends for you.

13. Use social identity on your ad copy – Another way for using social proof in the ads is to add it in your ad copy. You may select from different kinds of social identity.

• Expert social proof: Feature an expert who will suggest your products
• Celebrity social proof: Feature a micro-influencer or a celebrity that isendorsing your product.
• Wisdom of the crowd: Mention the number of customers you alreadyhave.

14. Encourage customers to give good rating on your Facebook Page – If you have a local business, then you can enable reviews and ratings on the Facebook Page. Good reviews and ratings are a great form of user social identity.

Check outthese few tips on asking customers for reviews:

• Ask in person.
• Reach out to repeated customers.
• Add a prompt to the surveys.
• Hold a contest or give incentives.
• Highlight customers who have given reviews.

15. Get verified on different social media platforms – You need to get verified on Facebook, Twitter and Instagramto receive a blue checkmark next to your name. Having a blue checkmark by your name is a form of certification social identity. The social media platform is actually an authoritative figure that believes you to be influential, popular or interesting to be awarded the checkmark. Itis only reserved for top brands and celebrities. Rather than improvingthe credibility and respect from the community, you would gain access to new features that are reserved for Pages and verified accounts only.

16. Try to be responsive – You may use Facebook and select the option to know how responsive you have been on Messenger. If you can provide customer support on Twitter, then it is necessary to state the time period when you had been most responsive. It might encourage more people to message you by knowing that they would get a response from you soon.

Read on to know how you can set it up for Twitter and Facebook:

• Twitter: Visitthe link: https://business.twitter.com/i/settings/support and click on “Add business feature”. In order to know that your account provides complete support, you have to accept direct messages from everyone. After this is done, you may set responsive hours and tailor a welcome message when they message you directly.
• Facebook: Go to Page settings and then choose “Messaging” tab. After this, scroll down to “Response Assistant” and select response time that will denote how soon you reply to messages. You may also set it to update automatically.

17. Display social share count – Showing the number of social share count is a great way of gettingsocial proof.People who are new to your website will think that it certainly is of great value and they may begin to consider it. Lower social share count may have the opposite effect. People might think the article is not sufficient even though it has been written really well. You can gethelp from a tool like Social Warfare that shows the share buttons but hides the number of share counts till the post receives a certain amount of shares.

18. Host Twitter chats – If you need to trend on Twitter, then this is another kind of social identity for the crowd. When the hashtag trends on Twitter, it might tempt people to click on it to find out more about it and then join the conversation.One of the best ways of getting a hashtag to trend on twitter is by hosting a Twitter chat.

Social identity may be used in many different ways. These 18 ideas can help to start using social proof for your marketing and also help you to generate new followers/customers.