Social proof is possibly one of the most basic of emotional pre-sales triggers that you can target in potential customers, subscribers, and readers. It’s basic, yes, but it is also one of the most crucial things to get right.
The Social Proof Tool Concept
Let me break this down a little further.
Social proof is easy enough to understand. It’s all around us, telling us how many downloads the most popular WordPress plugin has had, how many people liked ProBlogger’s last blog post enough to comment, and what is America’s most popular breakfast cereal.
Using social proof as a tool can be extremely powerful.
Would you subscribe to someone’s RSS feed if you knew you were the first? How would you feel about the information given if you knew this was the case? Would you trust it regardless of how good it is?
For a Sales Person, the social proof tool lets them demonstrate that what they are selling is extremely valuable, a good investment, and worth the money. More importantly it shows customers that other people are already satisfied with their purchase.
But why should it just stop with sales people?
Using social proof as a tool to sell your blog will be the most incredible thing you do with your blog. Ever.
Techniques
There are several techniques that you can use to show social proof on your blog immediately. Even when, like me, you don’t have a lot of subscribers.
I’ll first take you through two of the most typical methods of showing social proof on a blog and how to implement them quickly and easily on a WordPress blogging platform.
This is the way 99% of bloggers today show their readers that people are listening.
Displaying Subscriber Counts
I’m going to take you through a quick and dirty way in WordPress to display your subscriber counts from your FeedBurner RSS feed (sign up with FeedBurner.com now if you haven’t already). Because of it’s popularity, I’ll also take you through how to display your follower count from twitter.
This is the simplest way to show that people are interacting with your content.
Now, the main objection, which I too had to overcome, is: “I don’t have that many people subscribed, won’t this make me look worse?”
It’s a valid question. See, before you’re displaying your subscriber statistics you’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation. It’s an endless cycle: “I don’t have any people subscribed, so I can’t show my stats because I’ll look stupid” versus “I need people to subscribe, but they won’t because I’m not showing social proof“.
Here’s how to fix it. You need to just bite the bullet and put it out there.
I had only a few people subscribed when I started showing my statistics. It’s slowly growing (slooowly), but I’ve noticed an increase in interaction. My subscriber count now goes up almost daily.
So here’s how to do it:
Using The Text Widget To Display Subscriber Stats in WordPress
- Login to your administration panel for your WordPress blog.
- Click on the Appearance menu, then the Widgets submenu.
- Drag a Text Widget from the Available Widgets section to the top of your sidebar menu (or whichever desired position. I’d recommend keeping it visible in the top half of the site so people don’t have to scroll to see it.)
- Open a new tab, login to FeedBurner, and goto the publicize tab.
- Click on feed count and copy the code it generates. The reason we do the Feedburner one first, is because it’s got the surrounding code that we will need to display both counts side by side.
- Now open a second new tab, login to twittercounter.com
- Click on “Get more followers: Add twitter counter to your site [...]“. Copy the code that is generated for your desired button colour.
- This is the tricky part, paste the code you copied from twittercounter.com before the closing paragraph tag “</p>” in the code you copied from FeedBurner.com.We also need to set the image tag to floating for the FeedBurner image, this will let both images sit side by side. To do this, inside the style=”" on the img tag for the FeedBurner image, it should read style=”border: 0; float: left;”.Your code should now look something like this:<p><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/CodeMyOwnRoad”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/CodeMyOwnRoad?bg=99CCFF&fg=444444&anim=0″ height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0; float: left;” alt=”" /></a><script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=”http://twittercounter.com/embed/?username=terminus_inc”></script></p>
Creating a text widget to show subscriber counts in wordpress
- Paste this code into the text widget we created in the Widget’s sub menu in your Appearance settings in WordPress.
- Load your website and you should see something like this in your sidebar:
Showing your subscriber counts in a wordpress text widget
Other Great Social Proof Indicators
Here are a few other fantastic ways you can show social proof on your blog. I personally use these myself and have noticed their impact in lower bounce rates, and higher pageviews per visitor.
Display Popular Posts
I use the WordPress Popular Posts plugin by Hector Cabrera. It’s very effective, has a neat little widget which you can display in your sidebar, and is quite accurate.
You can gauge popularity a number of ways including overall page views, average daily page views, or comment count.
I also recommend showing these figures off as well. If your comments count isn’t very high, I recommend using average daily page views.
Notify Related Posts Other’s Found Useful
If you look at the bottom of all of my posts, I have a section that says something like “other’s who read this article also enjoyed:” and I link off to several other posts.
I achieve this with the WordPress Related Posts plugin by Denis. It’s quite neat, and customizable in a number of ways, the core functionality of it being that it outputs a list of posts that could possibly be related to the current post displayed.
Even though no one might be reading this post yet (if it’s a new post, or not very popular), it’s the wording that is important here. Letting the reader know that other’s have perused this article, liked it, and then moved on to other content is a key indicator that there might be more content worth reading.
Engage Your Audience
This means asking for comments, reading them, and responding to them in a timely manner.
Allow your readers to contact you in several ways; Twitter, comments, direct email. Let them interact with you, the author. There is nothing quite like that touched by fame feeling that comes over you when you talk to someone you admire.
By writing a blog, you have to remember you’re putting yourself in the public’s eye. With disseminating information in the way we do when we blog, it comes with some great responsibilities.
Remember that the people who make you popular are your readers, always engage them and be honest and responsive. It’s your duty, and they’ll thank you for it.
Conclusion
I hope this article has given you some food for thought about showing social indicators freely on your blog and what it can do for your readership.
Social indicators have a power behind them that isn’t easily understood, it might seem simple enough, but the amount of people who do fail to use them properly is astounding.
Follow the steps above and show your RSS subscriber count, and twitter following statistics. Add a popular posts widget, and a related posts section to the bottom of your posts. Ask for comments, subscriptions to your RSS feed, downloads of your eBook, whatever. Actively seek a response and you’ll get it.
Leave a comment below with your thoughts, or if you like what you’ve read so far and want to read more, subscribe to my RSS feed. I’d appreciate the confidence boost 
