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.

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.