So you are in a new city, town or village and you are
looking for somewhere to eat. You have walked past empty cafes and others that
are busy and almost bursting at the seams with noisy diners.
Which one do you eat at?
You are browsing at a book store and you pick up a book with
a catchy title and you check the flyer and you see the words “best seller” and
more than 1 million copies sold! You also notice that it has been endorsed by
other well known authors or celebrities.
Are you now more temped to buy it?
As you browse and search the web you find some blogs on the
topic area of choice, one has no evidence of how many readers subscribe
or share but the other has retweet buttons with hundreds of tweets and dozens
of Facebook shares.
Which blog is bookmarked first?
Why Social Proof Matters
The reality is that most people are followers and providing
social proof of popularity as provided by others can make people stop, engage
and buy.
Social proof can make people comment on or “Like” your
Facebook page. This again adds more social proof and encourages others to
become engaged.
Newspapers include how many of its papers are read every
day. Magazines list their subscriber count.
Why do they do that? …because it provides social proof and
it draws in more readers and it sells more newspapers and magazines.
Movies that have won Oscars shout it out in their
advertising and posters.
10 Types of Social Proof
So how do you incorporate social proof into your blog?
Consider placing widgets and banners in your blog.
This includes:
- Facebook Shares
- Numbers of Blog or RSS subscribers
- Facebook Likes or Fans
- Number of ReTweets
- Quantity of Email Subscribers
- Awards or Rankings
- Total of LinkedIn Shares
- The Number of Google +1′s
- The Number of Page views per Month
- Twitter Follower Count
Remember numbers are persuasive and providing social proof
and validating your credentials publicly will help take your blog to the
next level.
Has this worked for you? Look forward to hearing your
stories.
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