How to Get Testimonials For Your Product or Service Using Social Media

Understanding just how your customers and followers feel about your services or products is the cornerstone of good business and marketing strategies. In past decades, brick and mortar entities could more freely interact with their customers whenever they were in the store, and could directly request feedback and reviews. These days that personal interaction has shifted due to the dynamic of online shopping and social media, but testimonials remain just as valuable as ever. The following article will outline strategies you can use on select social media sites to elicit testimonials from your network and demonstrate the value of your brand.

Facebook

Undoubtedly the largest social media platform in the world, Facebook is the best place to find willing users who are ready to review and vouch for your brand – assuming you already have a Facebook social media presence and are pinging your blog or site, of course. Be sure to have your own Facebook page and enter in any and all data relating to your product or service – telephone number and physical location, especially. Another great way for your plea for testimonials to gain more exposure is to pin a post promoting it at the top of your page. You can unpin this at any time, but leaving it there for continuous periods will dramatically increase the number of people who will see it.

Twitter

A Twitter constituency will need a different approach than that of Facebook. One big advantage when it comes to testimonial promotion through Twitter is that individuals will be encouraged to leave brief responses due to the character limit. This allows customers and readers to boil down their impressions into its base form and submit it to you for consideration. You can also use Twitter to promote an off-site testimonial page for more detailed reviews, but we find that the former approach works best in regards to redistributing the commentary and it having a viral effect among those who are interested in your brand.

Universal Tactics

In many cases, it may be a good idea to entice your customers and followers to leave testimonials through a promotion. Seeing the inherent value in having real testimonials, you can offer coupons, discounts or freebies to those who are willing to dedicate a little bit of their time to giving you better insight into your brand and thus being able to showcase its positive attributes in a personal fashion. You could even consider an affiliate program of sorts, giving each individual who provides a testimonial a custom URL that is highlighting their thoughts while pinging your blog to promote it to their friends and acquaintances – with the one receiving the most traffic winning an even bigger prize.

Conclusion

Social media is great for obtaining responses from your followers. If you are just a tad creative about it while also providing incentive to your customers, you can harness those opinions via Facebook and Twitter, and proceed to use it as a platform to further your viral reach and overall content marketing strategies.

Do Google+1′s Really Affect Your SEO?

The hype around Google Plus has been fostered mainly by the implementation and integration of its “+1” feature into virtually all aspects of Google. It is very comparable to Facebook’s “Like” feature, but differs in some regards. Until recently, many people did not understand the purpose of this action, as it does not directly share or spread content whenever a user engages in a +1. Recent algorithm changes in Google have given the impression that +1s can in fact affect your search engine optimization process, and this has left many people asking the question: do Google Plus 1s really affect SEO?

Social Impacts

The primary benefit to having a solid performance when it comes to +1s is the boost you will receive in social searches. Whenever a friend has +1′d your page, for instance, their friends and anyone in their circles will be more likely to see that result whenever they search for a similar topic or interest. Google has increasingly placed an added amount of value on search preferences from friends and acquaintances whenever you search for a given query, giving you even more reason to be constantly pinging the servers of Google with new updates.

Effects on Broader Search Results

Many may be asking: how does this impact regular search results? The correlation seems to be clear: items that are +1′d more often have both a higher click through rate and a higher percentage chance of being shared with others. This leads to more traffic, and ultimately, a more positive association between select search results and your website by Google. Upon understanding this, it makes sense to have both a strong social media presence and a website that fully integrates concepts like Google Plus sharing directly into each piece of content. Failure to do so will lead to a loss of potential traffic – and your loss is someone else’s gain.

Other Considerations

Most of the benefits you will gain via +1s are indirect in nature, but will provide a good barometer of your site’s current health. If you suddenly see an increase in the content being shared via Google, then you can take some comfort in the fact that your content is being well-received and is pinging the servers of Google and other major search engines. It can also be reassuring to know that any social media strategy that is accompanied with your regular content marketing is having a positive effect.

Conclusion

The summary of analysing Google Plus suggests that there is a correlation between improved SEO and the increased use of +1s by readers and fans. As Google continues to move more and more toward a social search strategy in order to keep up with tactics used by search engines like Bing, these social indicators will become more and more powerful in driving your site to the top. For now, though, you can expect the biggest gains in this approach via the social network itself – sharing and +1′ing select content through Google will at least gain you more prominent featuring in search results for those using the social platform.

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How Can Google Plus Communities Be Used to Boost Your SEO?

With the evolution of social networks and its movement to the forefront of online communication, many businesses and websites feel overwhelmed at maintaining a consistent social presence across multiple platforms. Nevertheless, building a passive format through which traffic and business can be perpetually attracted is a mainstay in marketing and SEO these days, and Google Plus is one of the best mediums in which to engage other users. Google Plus Communities is a specific feature within the social network that can be utilized by you to increase exposure, but how exactly does it work? Continue reading to find out how you can grow your social clout.

What Are Google Plus Communities?

Whether you are wanting to network with family, friends or in this case, users and customers of your website and business, Google Plus Communities function in many ways as Facebook Groups do. The one key difference is that Google intertwines elements of theirs into search results. Communities allow for sharing of multimedia, video conferencing and can be configured to be either public or private. Many communities already exist for various interests and are publicly viewable, unless otherwise determined by the community admin. With an array of customizations available, you can create a discussion format that caters to your visitors and keeps them in the loop on current developments.

Instant Indexing

Google is constantly pinging sites for new information so that it can update the changes in its search results. The main goal of SEO is to have search engines update your content frequently and find it favourable. With Google Plus Communities, you have the advantage of being viewed both favourably and instantly by Google’s search elements. Communities are indexed and shown in select search results, giving you more exposure. When you establish a community on Google Plus, you can rest assured that all content within its existence will be picked up and displayed by Google in select search results.

Brand Awareness

Google Plus communities can be built with brand awareness in mind – how many times have we wished to reach out to new people but are not share how to do so? By creating a community for your brand and promoting its benefits, you can attract others who will be interested in its applications. Likewise, offering special benefits and discounts via the community is another great way to convince people to join up – particularly existing or recurring customers and visitors. You can amplify the effect this will have by pinging sites that you own with information about the newly-formed community, giving it a larger audience.

Increased Linkage

Another great benefit of Google Plus communities is that you will build up valuable networking connections that bring more and more people into your realm of influence. By commenting and discussing various elements on others’ profiles and communities, you can help attract those in your niche to check our your community as well. This has a snowballing effect, and before long you will be attracting new members, customers and visitors without much effort. In the beginning, though, it is important that you remain proactive in reaching out to those who share similar interests in order to get that growth started.

Learning Lessons from Three Basic Metrics – How to Grow Your Social Media Through Responding

In the world of social media, there are dozens of unique metrics that can be used to determine various levels of progress: some focus on visibility, while others are more concentrated on the rate at which their content goes viral. Each social campaign may have its own unique strategy and goals, but ultimately, some metrics are universal in determining success. Some metrics systems try to combine all the data into a simplified number or rating, but this does not do your social campaign any justice in determining strengths and weaknesses. Below, we have outlined three important metrics that should be considered for any and all campaigns, helping you to be aware of your growing (or shrinking) social presence.

Your Response Time

Customers, clients and followers of your brand expect to receive prompt feedback regarding their questions, comments or complaints. In many cases, a potentially bad situation can be rectified through simple attentiveness to the problem at hand. Rather than allowing those problems to go unsolved and in the process have criticisms pinging search engines, you should be attempting to have the lowest average response time possible. Simply put, this is an aggregate of all of your important messages and the average amount of time it took for you or someone with your brand to respond.

Your Response Rate

The best way to leave a bad impression is by leaving no impression at all – namely, by failing to respond to a message that would be deemed important by both yourself and the sender. Sometimes, people have simple questions about your brand that they would like answered. When you fail to respond, you leave an impression that the brand itself does not care about outside opinion or questions. Your response rate should include all important messages (the same as the response time metric) and your rate is simply determined by the number of messages you or your brand responded to out of those within a pre-determined period of time.

Your Rates Compared Against the Competition

Some social metric systems like Sprout Social allow users to monitor and compare their response times and response rates to that of other social campaigns that are within their niche or industry. When comparing this data, obviously you will want these two metrics to be at least average, but preferably better than average. Campaigns that go above and beyond the call of duty will often find themselves rewarded with positive social commentary and increased web chatter, all of which will be pinging search engines with their comments and findings.

While many metrics may be valuable in discerning the success of your social media campaign, one of the most important ways in which you can be sure that you are doing your part is through monitoring your attentiveness to customers’ and clients’ questions. By taking a proactive approach, you can appease all those who have questions and comments while also defusing many volatile situations with irate individuals. Please, consider keeping an eye on these response metrics so you can be on top of your social media empire and be ready to handle the next big challenge.