3 Places to Collect Great Reviews and Testimonials

Did you know online reviews influence 86% to 90% of customers’ buying decisions? This is why it is essential that you have reviews and testimonials on your own website. This will give you the opportunity to present your potential customers with a good view of your products and services.

If they have to go to research your brand’s reviews off site, it gives them more chances to discover negative reviews or more positive reviews for your competitors. In this post, we’re going to look at three places to collect great reviews and testimonials for your website, plus how you can publish them on your own website.

Your first source of testimonials should be social media. In particular, you can look for and embed the following types of social media updates on your website.

Tweets.
Use Twitter’s search box to search for mentions of your business, products, or services. When you find some good mentions, you can click on the three dots at the bottom of the tweet to find the embed code for them.
Facebook posts.
Look at your Facebook page’s post to page and reviews. When you find good ones, you can click on the timestamp (date and time it was posted) to see the individual update. At the top right, click on the down arrow and the more options link to find the embed code. You can also use the search box to find public mentions by friends and other pages about your business that you can also use on your website.
LinkedIn Recommendations.
If you have good LinkedIn recommendations on your professional profile, you can add them to your website using this customer testimonials widget by Spectoos for only $10 per month.
Google+ posts.
Use the Google+ search box to find public mentions of your business, products or services. When you find them, click the down arrow at the top right to find the embed code for them.
Instagram posts.
Are people using your brand name or related keywords as a hashtag? Find out by going to https://instagram.com/explore/tags/tennis/ and change tennis to your brand name or a related topic to your products or services. When you find some great photos or videos, you can click on them and then click on the three dots at the bottom right of the update to get the embed code.

Why is embedding powerful? Because visitors to your website will get to see the face of and the actual comment by your customer. They will be able to go directly to the update to confirm that it is a real testimonial. There will be no denying that a real person is happy with your business.

After doing an initial search on social media, you can monitor social media mentions of your business by keeping track of your Twitter and Facebook mentions as well as using tools like Mention to be alerted to those not posted with your username or directly on your social pages.

Review Networks

Not all review networks are created equal, but when you do find positive reviews of your business on them, you can capture them in a variety of ways to publish on your website. The quickest way to publish a review from a review network is by capturing a screenshot of it.

You can use free tools like Techsmith’s Jing to grab a screenshot of a testimonial from a review network and insert the image onto your testimonials page. This is especially useful for reviews from Yelp, which will include the reviewer’s photo and stats.

On networks like TripAdvisor, where your business has a summary of the reviews you’ve received, you can grab a screenshot of that summary showing the number of total reviews you have received and their average ratings.

After doing an initial search for online reviews, you can monitor your local reviews by bookmarking your profiles or signing up for premium monitoring services by ReviewTrackers or ReviewPush.

Articles and Blog Posts

You’ve likely seen the businesses that have a “featured on” section where they highlight top publications their business has been mentioned upon. These are based on mentions within articles or blog posts on recognized online publications.

If you can find your business mentioned on sites your customers would respect, collect those links and those publication’s logos. Create a featured on section for your website and elsewhere, create a page for media mentions and link to those pages so customers can verify that your business was, in fact, positively mentioned on CNN, the local newspaper, or other authoritative publication.

After doing an initial search, the best way to keep up with mentions like these is by signing up for Google Alerts or Talkwalker Alerts for free email notifications.

In Conclusion

Leveraging social media, review networks, and mentions of your business on popular online publications, you will be able to demonstrate to customers visiting your website that your business, products, and services are loved. Capturing a variety of these types of social proof will help you keep more visitors on your website and convert them into great customers.