The Power of Social Proof – All the Cool Kids Are Using It, Are You?
April 29, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
If you didn’t already notice, the web is a very social place with sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn popping up all over the place. Interactions in the real world tend to transfer over to the Internet and people rush to what’s popular and what everyone else is doing.
If you’re promoting a website these days and really want it to take off, you absolutely need to utilize social proof. Prove that your site is worthy by showing off your users and your popularity. It’s generally human nature to follow the crowd so the bigger your following, the more people will pay attention and follow you as a result. A site with strong social aspects will usually have an exponential growth model that spreads virally.
I know it sounds unfair. The popular get even more popular and the unknown sink deeper into obscurity. However, there’s an optimal way of playing your cards at both ends of the spectrum. Whether you have an active well-known site or a site that you just started yesterday, this guide will help you to maximize your traffic and get people paying attention to you and talking about your site.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it!
A popular site with an active community can always take advantage of social proof to strengthen authority and increase the perception of value. If you have the goods, why not flaunt it and maximize the benefits? People are much more likely to trust a site that is trusted by others but first you have to give them signs that clearly show this status. What do I mean by this? See some of the examples below.
A highly visible Feedburner subscriber count
Can you really miss the subscriber count here? Andy Beard has a great blog on niche marketing that you cannot miss out on. The high subscriber count only backs up this claim. There’s no need for excessive self promotional copy because the social proof is right there. You can obtain the Feed Count Wordpress plugin to achieve a similar effect for your own blog.
High number of comments on posts
Comments are a great way to interact with readers on your blog. Not only that, but they are great for showing that you have quality content that stirs up questions, feedback, and controversy. In every post you write, you want to focus on increasing your comment count and getting your readers to voice their own opinions.
Members & Users online now
An active site with a bustling community will motivate users to sign up and get involved in the conversations taking place. This is an absolute must for membership sites, forums, and other online communities.
Pages & languages
A huge site like Wikipedia can boast about the number of articles and all of the different languages it offers. Pretty tough to compete with that.
Rankings
A high ranking on sites like Alexa and Technorati can help to solidify an authority position.
Badges
Is your site included in an exclusive group of top sites? For example, Lee Odden of Top Rank frequently updates his BIG LIST of the best Internet marketing blogs.
Traffic stats
Traffic stats are more common on pages selling advertising, but they can also be used to show the popularity of a site. Stuff White People Like is a great example of this. In just a few months, the humorous blog managed to gather over 25 million visits. That’s just insane.
Social media votes
Social media votes can easily be placed on a page to encourage voting and to display the article’s popularity with users of various sites like Sphinn, StumbleUpon, and Digg.
Interviews
Interviews, if you can get them, show authority status about a certain topic. I was lucky enough to do some of the interviews shown below.
Interview with Gyutae Park – Bernard Griffiths
Interview with Gyutae Park of Winning the Web – Blog Herald
Shooting Money Out Of Your Other End To Gain…? – Bloggin Ads
But what if I’ve got nothing?
If you have a new site that just launched or a site that isn’t on par to where you’d like it to be, there are 2 options you can take in regards to optimizing social proof.
1. Hide it
If you can’t back yourself up with the items listed above, then don’t use them at all. So many times I see new sites displaying poor statistics that are sure to turn off visitors and give off a bad first impression. You won’t have the numbers or the social proof off the bat. In that case, it’s better to focus on your content so that you can develop the following that will help you gain popularity. Never display a Feedburner subscriber count less than 100.
2. Fake it
I don’t really recommend going this route because it’s stressful to put up a front and be fake and it’s easy for people to figure you out and tarnish your reputation. Some of the ways sites can “fake it” include inflating Feedburner subscribers, leaving fake comments and forum threads, manipulating rankings and traffic stats, and buying social media votes. Faking might help to get a site off the ground (especially a forum site), but in the long run quality sites with real followers will always win out.
Are you using social proof to promote your sites? If so, which have you had the most success with? Sometimes, all you need is a small statistic to get people to notice you and get excited about what you have to offer.
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Feedburner for some reason have been dropping some of my subscribers recently, it should be showing over 4000.
I am actually heading for another upgrade, I have been using that since June of last year. I wrote a short guide, though I didn’t provide artwork.
http://andybeard.eu/2007/06/converting-visitors-into-subscribers.html
The script I am using is called Conflagration, and it is very powerful, and at the same time quite low on resources, as it has a cache of the image created which is less than 10kb with some heavy jpeg compression.
I will be moving away from using Feedburner for email subscriptions, and offering some private content.
Very cool. Thanks for the info Andy. I don’t think your blog design is the prettiest or the flashiest, but I can see it being one of the best in terms of conversions (RSS subscriptions).
How have the different versions affected your subscription rates? Any key takeaways other than the fact that the upper left side is prime real estate?
Thanks for the linkback Gyutae
I think this is a very great post that new bloggers should follow. The blogosphere is a lot tougher to beat now because of all these new blogs that Entrecard brought out. I’m not saying Entrecard is necessarily a bad thing, but more blogs = more competition.
-Mike
No problem Mike. Thanks again for the interview.
I agree that the blogosphere is becoming more crowded, but the number of top quality blogs is still very limited. Hard work, passion, and dedication will usually result in good results.
I especially like the part discussing faking it and hiding it. I have never faked it before but sometimes I feel like what is holding people back is because no one else is doing anything.
Faking is actually a common tactic that many website owners use to get a jumpstart. Back when I first started creating forums, I used to create multiple users and have conversations with myself. Not the optimal situation but that did bring on real people to start the community.
Hey, thanks for the link for the feed plugin, I was wondering where to get that!
Jay
Sure, no problem. Let me know how that works out for you.
You can also use the Conflagration script that Andy mentioned above: http://raygunrobot.com/archives/Conflagration-A-better-web-feed-subscr iber-widget
It uses the Feedburner API so it’s probably more flexible than the plugin.
great article..! some good points are made with it… love the fact that people fake their information.. (money they make, stats, page rank, etc..)
Faking probably isn’t the best route to take, especially when money is involved. But still you can do some subtle things to give off the impression that you have an active site. Encouraging comments on blog posts for example.
If Stuff White People Like got 25 million visits, then why isn’t it on its own domain?
Well the blog started off on Wordpress.com and then gained huge amounts of popularity. It’s probably very difficult to transfer over to a new domain at this point. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow redirects or anything like that.
Another lesson that it’s best to have your own domain when starting a site.