The power of testimony

One of the key elements of Social Media Marketing (SMM) is trust. A good way to gain trust is through testimonials. Testimonials are where someone; A colleague, someone you’ve worked with on a joint venture, a vendor, or a customer is ready to write a short article about why they think you’re a good person to do business with.

Two social networks; LinkedIn and ecademy have a very well structured and good way of exchanging testimonials online. I would advise anyone who uses SMM to join both as they both have free and paid options. LinkedIn allows you to ask your connections to give you a testimonial. I found this to be both good and bad. It was an easy way to ask, but I got some hostile responses and some very pleasant surprises. On ecademy, you actually visit a person’s profile and if you decide to give them a testimonial, you can do it there and then pretty easily. Another good source would be clients or people you’ve recruited for your network marketing team. Ask them if they would be prepared to write a short testimonial if they enjoyed your work.

Many people aren’t sure what to say, so you could have one or two ready and just ask them if they could write something similar. Written on company letterhead is great if you can get it.

Here’s what you can do to make the most effective use of testimonials:

• On your blog, create a page called Testimonials. ‘cut and paste’ any online testimonial into a Notepad file. Then enter each testimonial by editing the page instead of creating posts. The posts will appear on your home page and you want them to appear only on the testimonials page.
• Use the following format for each testimonial; [Name of person], [Company], [Position in Company] [The text of the testimonial i.e what they said about you] [The social network it is on], [The date it was written]
• This means that people can go and review the testimonials if they want to.
• For written testimonials use the same format, but for the source put [Letter of endorsement] instead of [The social network it was on]
• Create an offline archive of these testimonials. You can use your creativity here. This can be used if you are meeting clients face to face.
• One last form of testimonial that is very powerful (I suggest 1 or 2 of these) is a video testimonial of no more than 3 minutes. Upload the video to YouTube and then embed the video code on the testimonials page.

Testimonials provide social proof that you are someone who can be trusted. So what is the best way to get an online testimonial? Start by giving them to people whose work you really like. You will soon find that people will reciprocate if you provide genuine value-added content to that network.