3 Ways Companies Can Leverage Social Reviews
Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest, is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter at @seosmarty and on Google+.
Testimonials can be powerful marketing tools. But in the digital age customers have reason to doubt if every good review is a reflection of a good product or a made up comment meant to boost a company’s reputation. Social media testimonials, on the other hand, are harder to fake because there’s generally a person with a record of activity behind each one.
In fact, collecting and re-posting positive social media reviews not only shines a credible light on a company but may actually help search results for the brand and promote the company’s biggest supporters. Here are three ways to do this.
1. Twitter Favorites
Someone is always tweeting about your business and you want to be there to listen and respond to what people are saying. That’s why collecting the most favorable mentions is something you need to embrace. Twitter Favorites is a great tool to instantly save anyone’s Twitter testimonials for promotion. Below are three great ways to search Twitter for these items.
- Determine all possible ways your brand name may be used. This will include: [brand name], [brandname], [brandname.com]. Twitter search allows you to combine all of them in one search like this: ["brand name" OR brandname OR brandname.com]
- Filter out your own tweets with “minus” operator: ["brand name" OR brandname OR brandname.com -from:@brandname]
- Filter out re-tweets of your own tweets by searching: ["brand name" OR brandname OR brandname.com -from:@brandname -RT]
Here’s an example.
If you are using Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Cyfe, consider adding the following search commands as well. You can see an example in the image below.
- Filter out links with -infilter:links command to find unlinked mentions
- Search for “unsatisfied” and/or “happy customers” by adding
or 
to a search query
Here’s an example.
By re-tweeting Twitter testimonials and adding them to your favorites list, you give them a chance to rank better in Twitter “top” search results, which is a default tab for Twitter search. You can also use these reviews in the following places.
- Add your favorites to your signature with Wisestamp
- Import your favorites to your Facebook page
- Create a widget of your favorites using Twitter’s official tool to share the testimonials on your site which would certainly add to your brand credibility
- Create an RSS feed. Twitter has removed the link to your Favorites RSS feed, but it’s still working and can be found here: https://twitter.com/favorites/TWITTERUSERNAMEHERE.rss.
2. Pinterest
Pinterest may have plenty of possible applications — one of which is to let people better understand your business. So creating a separate board to feature your social media testimonials, like those you pulled from Twitter, can be a good idea. This will allow your followers to opt out if they don’t want to see your testimonials in their timelines without unfollowing you. This will also serve as a page that can rank on Google.
To take items like tweets and put them on your Pinterest board, consider using Pin a Quote. (See the example below.) Another way to share your text testimonials on Pinterest is with Screen to Pin or Url2Pin.it. Both of these can instantly create a screenshot of a page and share it on Pinterest. Finally, consider pinning videos, which make for great exposure on this site.
3. Content Curating Sites
Most content curation sites support Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other key content sources you need to curate for your brand mentions. (To better understand what content curation is, I highly recommend this article by Gianluca Fiorelli.) Here are three curation tools I use and recommend.
- Storify: Summarizes Twitter search results, especially around your official hashtag.
- Themeefy: Creates tablet-friendly magazines you can easily download.
- ScoopIt: Aggregates sources into one RSS feed.
Are you collecting and re-packaging your social media testimonials to promote them? Please let us know your tactics!
More About: brands, content curation, contributor, features, Marketing, pinterest, Twitter
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