Did you ever find yourself asking your friends “hey, do you know a good doctor for X?” If so, this was you looking for social proof before making an important decision.
What happens if your friends and family don’t have an answer for you? You go online and look for a doctor with good reviews. 49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family.
54.7% of consumers read at least four reviews before making a purchase. Better yet, product pages with reviews have a 3.5x better conversion rate than those without.
All the stats and reports you find online tell you the same thing: social proof is one of the biggest growth levers, irrespective of the industry you are in.
Why do we click, buy, and rave about the products our peers loved?
Let’s take a look inside our brains (in a non-creepy way).
Why social proof works
Made popular by Robert Cialdini in Influence, social proof has always been a staple for marketers. Cialdini explains it best:
“The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”
“We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.”
“When we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd.”
“First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.”
“Social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.”
“Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”
I know, you don’t particularly like being called a herd animal. Neither do I. But science begs to differ:
The neurology of social proof
Social proof is implicit egotism and linked to the mirror neurons in our brains. We tend to align our own judgment to what others believe, irrespective of what we initially thought, as one study found:
“Participants strongly aligned their judgments in the direction of other people’s deviation from their own initial rating, which was neither an effect of regression toward the mean nor of evaluative conditioning.”
“We thus demonstrate that the brain places particular emphasis on the encoding of the rewarding experience of finding strong social proof for one’s judgments”, another study found.
Say you want to buy a web camera. You have a set budget, a few must-have features, and perhaps one or two favorite brands. You search for products that meet your non-negotiable criteria and you’re left with three options to choose from.
This is when the reviews come into play. If there is no other notable difference between the cameras on your shortlist, you are most likely to buy the one that has the most and the best reviews. This is precisely what the study above found: “[the] rewarding experience of finding strong social proof for one’s judgments”.
How do you get there? How do you offer that rewarding experience to your potential buyers? Let’s see!
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Types of social proof [spoiler alert, you need more than one]
Referral Candy identifies six major types of social proof, to which I added a seventh one.
1. Expert social proof
Reviews and recommendations from your audience’s peers are excellent for the relatability factor but having experts recommend your product is next-level. Colgate has always done this very well.
Bonus points if you can get one or two famous experts to put their name and their face next to your product.
2. Celebrity social proof
You know this one well, I’m sure. It started out as celebrities starring in commercials and, in recent years, it morphed into influencers recommending various brands.
This is Taylor Swift recommending Diet Coke:
And a bunch of other celebs who were publicly shamed for endorsing unhealthy or otherwise damaging products.
3. Reviews and testimonials
You know them from Google, Facebook, Yelp, and, ideally, you know them from your own business, where you collect them religiously, right? If not, keep reading, we’ll fix that together.
Reviews and testimonials are essentially quotes about your products or services from your past or current clients. They can be written, added on a nice background, or in video format. More on formats below.
4. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) social proof or the conformity effect
This one has a touch of sleaze to it, so use it sparingly and, above all, transparently. It bets on instilling FOMO in your audience by telling them that the product everyone loves might be sold out soon.
Booking.com played on FOMO and the conformity effect (our natural tendency to align our choices with those of people around us) by misleading visitors into thinking more people are looking at certain hotels than there actually were:
Paired with “hurry up! Only one room left on our website!”, the “17 people are looking at this property” nudge is extremely powerful.
The EU banned this tactic years ago (it took me a while to find the image above). You won’t find how many people are looking at a property you’re interested in anymore, but you’ll still find a bunch of FOMO-inducing messages on their platform: number of rooms left (usually very low), claims that your destination is in very high demand and most properties are booked, and so on.
5. Certifications and “featured on” badges
I call this popularity by contagion. If your work or your story has been featured in a popular media outlet, it’s time to flaunt it. I do this on my homepage:
6. Referrals
Referrals work best for service-based businesses. If a former client loved your work and they are willing to refer their friends and peers to you, it will be the easiest way you ever closed a new lead.
Why?
Because referrals come with built-in trust. Your new lead already trusts the referrer’s judgment — otherwise, they wouldn’t have contacted you in the first place. All you need is a but of luck and a touch of chemistry between you and your prospect during the initial call.
7. Audience size/crowd approval
I’ve added this one to the list because I think it matters immensely, especially for creators or small businesses built on the owner’s reputation and personal brand.
We inherently trust popular names/brands because there is safety in crowds.
Think about it this way: you need help with your branding and you find 10 branding experts on LinkedIn. Barring any budget concerns, who are you going to work with — the expert with 800 followers or the one with 10K followers?
However rational we try to make our decision process, we can’t help but think that 10K people can’t be wrong. 800 might, though.
This is terribly unfair, I know. Social media popularity is not always an indicator of a creator or a brand’s prowess in their field. More often than not, it’s an indicator of how well they can manipulate algorithms and how charismatic they are.
But you can’t fight human nature. This is why you’ll probably see validated experts with decades of experience in their field charge less than an internet star. If they don’t have public validation and crowd approval (yet), they have to charge less until they can gather enough social proof to appease the inherent need for conformity.
If you don’t have hordes of fans and social media proof yet, here’s how to start building it.
How to get social proof the easy way
First off, please remember that you can’t start too soon. Your first client, your friend that you helped with a minor tweak, the first media outlet that published your work — all of these are social proof. Gather it from day one!
You can automate social proof gathering — there are a ton of software solutions out there. But if your business depends on how people perceive you or your team, I suggest doing it manually, at least in the beginning.
- Work relentlessly on increasing your audience. The bigger your audience is, the easier it is to grow it even further and to get any type of social proof. Attention clusters where it finds attention clusters.
- DM, email, or ask for testimonials during a call.
- Explain why they matter to you. People are more likely to take the time to write/record a testimonial if they know they can help you. Don’t let them guess it, say it outright.
- Screenshot every comment, social media post, or mention that puts you in a good light.
- No clients yet? Offer your services/products for free to get your first testimonials. This will also help with product validation.
- Set up an automated email sequence asking every buyer for feedback on your products. If they don’t reply, follow up manually — but don’t overdo it! It feels pushy and desperate.
By far, my favorite thing to do when collecting testimonials is to incentivize my clients to write them. To share the spotlight with them.
I tell them that there’s something in it for them too and I make good on that promise. All the testimonials I use on my landing pages or on my social media channels have:
- A clear picture of my client
- Link to their website or social media profile
- Their job title of choice
- Social media tag (if published on social media).
This way, they gain some popularity and brand recognition as well. In an era when attention is the new oil, it’s not something to snark at.
Try this when asking for testimonials — I have zero doubt it will increase your conversion rate!
You’ve got the goods, now how do you leverage them?
You can’t have too much social proof! Have you seen how obnoxious the social proof on my newsletter landing page is? I’ve had dozens of people tell me that they were convinced by the testimonials there to subscribe.
Sometimes, they recognized one of the people who wrote a testimonial for Ideas to Power Your Future (expert social proof). Other times, they were convinced by the sheer number of testimonials (crowd approval).
My advice here is straightforward: use social proof everywhere. On your landing pages, social media posts, quote testimonials in podcasts and interviews — E V E R Y W H E R E.
You’ve probably seen this advice before. I have two more pieces of advice you probably haven’t seen yet. Coincidentally or not, they are my favorite ways to leverage social proof:
Repurpose and cross-publish social proof
Got a review on Google or Yelp? Cool! Screenshot it or link to it and use it on Facebook, in emails, on landing pages, and so on.
It’s a strong signal that your brand awareness and popularity span beyond one channel. Plus, it can get some of your audience to follow you on other channels as well.
Use “raw” social proof too, not just the picture-perfect kind
I’ll exemplify. I have this amazing testimonial from Michael Scott Overholt for my 1:1 strategy session.
I asked for it at the end of our session together and Michael was kind enough to send me the quote that I placed in a pretty template. I use it everywhere, as often as possible.
While I haven’t changed a word in his testimonial, it might feel a bit scripted because readers obviously know it underwent some “processing”.
Here’s what that didn’t undergo any processing — my friend Hannah Szabo’s comment about my newsletter:
She wrote it without me asking her to. It lives out there, in the “wild”. Sure, it’s not as pretty as a quote pasted on an on-brand template but it often does the job better because it feels more honest.
They are both equally honest. But, again, you can’t fight human nature. [By the way, did you see how I linked to their website/social media profile? Share the spotlight!]
Speaking of human nature, I can’t sign off before a few words of caution.
When social proof gets problematic
I encourage you to avoid manufacturing social proof. I know it’s quite common to use AI to generate pictures of people who don’t exist and paste them on testimonial templates. Those “people” certainly can’t complain, so who’s gonna know?
They’re gonna know — your audience I mean.
Also, while crowd approval is a strong trust signal, even large groups of people CAN reach wron conclusions, a phenomenon known as groupthink. Before you buy something based on crowd approval alone (the seller has a large following, for instance), look for OTHER trust signals and types of social proof as well.
Social proof can be manipulated. Sometimes, it’s as innocuous as getting us to buy a pair of sneakers. But in extreme cases, it can lead to group violence. More than 900 people died in the Jonestown Massacre after ingesting poison at the beckoning of their cult leader. This is, perhaps, the worst use of social proof in history. Isolated from the rest of the world, the cult members couldn’t emulate anyone else but each other. Yes, social proof can turn into mass psychosis.
I know, this is an extreme example and not applicable to online businesses. It works, however, as a reminder that you are responsible for how you interpret social proof when you are a buyer or a follower (of cults or brands).
More importantly, it works as a reminder that, as a business owner, you bear the responsibility of using social media proof ethically.
That’s it from me today! See you next week in your inbox!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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Adriana’s Picks
- I recently discovered a newsletter with very, very interesting curated stock picks. Curious? They call themselves The Red Pill Of Stock Picking Services. Join the Money Machine Newsletter here.
- I joined Simon Chappuzeau on the StoryLux podcast to talk about how I use AI in my agency and for this newsletter. Spoiler alert: it’s very meta, I use it to find contrarian views to my own contrarian views. Listen to the full episode here.
- Meta’s LLaMA 2 is going open source with the help of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, Amazon Web Service, and Hugging Face. It’s free to use and build something with it!
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