Social Proof
(find out what Social Proof is and why it is essential in your business)

One of the most important elements of a website and the one that has the greatest impact on the conversion rate is social proof, i.e. all the content that shows potential customers that your brand exists and that other people have already tried your products or services and were happy and satisfied with them. This has incredible power because it automatically influences people and leads them to try the same product or service.

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In fact, it has been shown that up to 65% of people look at customer reviews before making a purchase decision; and almost 95% of people who read negative comments from former customers decide to abandon the purchase.

Normally, most people decide to buy a product if the reviews about it or the brand exceed 4 stars.

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All these statistics make us realise that having comments and feedback from our customers is a crucial element when it comes to generating purchase conversions. If we want to go further, we can say that it is the most relevant element after the web structure (the latter is clearly decisive because if a person does not easily find what they want on a website, they do not even check the reviews and simply leave the website, probably forever).

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Now that we have understood its value, we will find out in full detail how social proof works, how to create social proof that helps to convert and the guidelines to follow to get as many positive reviews as possible.

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First of all, it is important to say that social proof can be generated across many platforms and, in fact, the best strategy would be to have positive social proof on all platforms where it is visible:

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• website: definitely the most relevant because it is what people who enter our website see and it is usually the highest traffic (not having good reviews can generate resistance in deciding whether or not to buy a product); they are the easiest to get, because there are free applications that allow you to schedule automatic emails that are sent after each order (we will see later on how to prepare them)

• Facebook & Instagram: social networks are also important because reviews and comments can be collected, especially on two different levels: on Facebook there is a brand section dedicated exclusively to reviews, so many people tend to look at this information before discovering other products within the same brand page; Apart from this, on both FB and IG, the photos posted can have comments from people telling of their experience with the same product that appears in the photo, which generates more trust in the eyes of other users, and there are also likes, which are a form of social proof, albeit less strong

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• Google My Business: these are limited to people who have a google account and can be left by people outside your brand (haters or people who leave an opinion without having bought your product or service), but they have two big advantages

- every day more and more people look at google reviews even before they enter a website, especially depending on the type of business of the brand (think of restaurants in a city: nobody goes to restaurants with google reviews below 3.5 stars, even if they have 2000 reviews, which gives you an idea of how much they can be worth to a brand

- act directly on the SEO level for your webpage, so having 50 reviews on Google is more important than having 50 reviews on your site, at least on the positioning side (because on the conversion side we have already said that site reviews are worth more).

 

Ideally, you would like to have an application that allows you to connect and bring all Google and Facebook reviews to your website so that they serve you both on an SEO and conversion level; you will also increase the number of reviews on your website, which would give it even more credibility. We recommend FERA, which is compatible with many web platforms, costs very little and links all your reviews.

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EXTRA TRUCK*: when it comes to social proof, you cannot forget videos and, in particular, the world's most famous video generator: YouTube. Youtube is usually recommended because it has the advantage of being Google's video platform, so you get a very important return at the SEO level. But also on a simple social proof level, having videos of your customers talking about your product or service can benefit you. You can either leave these videos directly on your website (avoiding page saturation, as this would otherwise slow down the loading process) or leave them on YouTube, freely available to everyone. The reason for this is very simple: according to a study by thinkwithgoogle.com, almost 90 per cent of people who buy something on the Internet say that they value reviews created on YouTube because they generate more trust in this type of content.