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.