Social Allure and the Packed Café

Testimonials are one of the most powerful forms of marketing. People want the things they see other people talking about. But testimonials can feel inauthentic when done poorly.

Enter social media. People talk about brands all the time on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. And these unsolicited testimonials are verifiably real, authentic, and incredibly persuasive.

The neighborhood diner

Think of your brand's home page as a local neighborhood diner. People are walking past deciding if they should come in. Sure, its important that you have a great sign, clean interior, and appealing menu, but the main deciding factor is the view of people inside enjoying their meals.

If the tables are empty, you assume the place must be no good. But if people seem happy—or better yet, if you can overhear them talking about how great the food is—that's the social proof that gets you to come in for a meal.

In the same way, your home page has to do all the right things from a business and communication standpoint, but adding social proof can get people to the tipping point where they take the step of action that you want from your visitors.

But isn't this a lot of work?

Sure, you could go out and scour the web for good tweets, photos, and status updates on Facebook, then arduously copy and paste them into to your website, but that is a ton of work. FeedMagnet makes the whole process easy.

We pull in content from all the major social sites, let you apply automated filtering to get just the best updates, and even let you hand-pick the ones you want to display—pushing them seamlessly onto your website.

Bazaarvoice is using FeedMagnet to aggregate buzz from employees, the official company feed, and social proof from people mentioning their brand on Facebook and Twitter.

Thundercloud Subs displays updates from fans, pulled in from Facebook and Twitter - showcasing the love for their brand. Not only does FeedMagnet let them combine Twitter and Facebook updates, but every post can be reviewed by the brand manager before being pushed to the site.

Getting real

If you've done your job well and built a brand, product, or experience that people are talking about online, it's time to tap into that resource. Get rid of your fake plastic (and often stagnant) testimonials and replace them with the real deal.

Testimonials are dead. Long live the social testimonial.