The Importance of Social Proof

I have been reading a lot lately about the importance of social reviews in boosting your business.

You can have an amazing website, with great content, promoting excellent product. However, customers are looking for one more thing before they are willing to spend their money: they want to see reviews from others who purchased from you, to assure themselves that you are the real deal. They want social proof, because buyers are influenced by what others say and purchase.

Here are some reasons why social proof is important to your website:

• Testimonials add credibility for the products or services you offer.
• People tend to trust online reviews, which makes them more likely to purchase from a company that has strong reviews
• Social proof earns better SEO, because it add more favorable language around your brand online.
• When seeking opinions from your customer base, you are demonstrating that you care about their experience, strengthening the relationship you have with them.

There are different ways to get ratings for your website. There are plugins that will gather your ratings, not only from your website, but from social media, YELP, etc. Another option is to send out a survey to recent customers seeking their feedback. Or you can ask for permission from customers who have left good feedback on social media to use on your website. I'm sure you creative people have other possible ways of gathering this feedback.

I am interested to know how many of you gather and display social proof on your websites. Did you add it in order to increase customer confidence for your brand? Besides comments on posts and pages, what methods have you used to display social proof?