Social Signals & Their Importance
Social signals. It’s like copywriting but other people are doing it for you.
Social signals are also a ranking factor but we’re not going to dive into that today. We’re going to focus on the UGC aspect.
So what’s the point of social signals? It’s to convince & reassure the buyer that they’re making a good decision.
While the main goal is to increase your conversion rate by pretending to bigger than you actually are, you’ll also be getting the discoverability exposure when implementing most of these.
Types of Social Signals
Before we get too far, I’m defining social signals as what other people look to before they purchase your product. If you find a store or product you like but it has 0 presence other than the website, you’re really going to hesitate to buy.
If you find a product on Amazon that has 0 reviews, are you going to click that “buy now” button?
Does the store actually exist or is it just a website? If it actually exists, can it really be that good if nobody on the internet is talking about them?
Humans are social creatures. We look to those around us to make decisions.
It makes sense from a survival perspective. If nobody is eating those black berries, there must be a good reason. Poisonous?
There’s a bunch of other examples I could give. No matter how much of an “independent thinker” you think you are, all humans rely on other humans to inform their decisions. Either consciously or subconsciously.
There’s no real universal social signals across every type of business so you’ll have to do some research. How do people buy your product and who do they look to to inform their decision making?
Are they Googling your brand to see what they can find? Looking at socials, Yelp, aggregators, etc.?