Why Reviews are
the Best Social
Marketing Tool
Introduction
Reviews do more than just increase on-site conversions.
They’re secret sauce for marketers who want to increase qualified traffic and boost engagement.
People often ask us how they should start using reviews in their marketing, and what strategies will get them the best results.
We’ve got one answer: For insane ROI, you need to use reviews in social marketing.
Reviews and social are a match made in heaven, and yet they’re one of the most underrated tools for increasing social reach, traffic, and sales.
The truth is, if you’re not
using your customer reviews in social marketing, you’re missing out.
We analyzed over 100,000 eCommerce stores to see what we could learn about stores who are using reviews in social marketing to prove their power.
The lesson?
Why?
It’s time to take reviews a lot more seriously.
Reviews are one of the fastest-growing social marketing tools. They can be leveraged to improve existing marketing efforts while boosting on-site conversion, traffic, and engagement.
Why reviews are the best social marketing tool
How reviews impact the marketing trifecta: traffic, engagement, and conversions
Best practices to get awesome results from marketing with reviews
In this guide, you will learn:
1 2 3
Social does contribute to conversions, just maybe not in the way you think of. In other words, it’s not always direct, but that definitely does not mean that social doesn’t matter.
Social media is your number one way to reach new potential customers. No other marketing channel allows you to reach so many people.
In addition to boosting conversions, adding reviews helps multiply the power of word-of-mouth by
adding social proof to your marketing efforts.
Too many eCommerce stores misunderstand how to harness the power of social.
Changing algorithms and a reduction of organic reach has led many to assume social isn’t selling.
Part 1
Why Reviews Are The Best Social Marketing Tool
But this just isn’t true.
Referrals are one of the fastest growing sources of traffic for eCommerce stores.
Social referrals drive word-of-mouth to attract valuable customers with higher lifetime value and less churn.
Authentic and verified reviews shared on social significantly increase brand trust.
Reviews shared as social referrals naturally target to reach customers in similar target audiences and demographics as current customers
Reviews absolutely dominate at social marketing because they increase every single point of the marketing trifecta: traffic, engagement, and
conversions. But don’t let us tell you, we’ll let the data speak for itself.
How do reviews impact social traffic growth?
We took 100 sites who are sharing reviews on social. For these sites the increase in social traffic over a single quarter is very significant.
Part 2
How Reviews Impact The Marketing Trifecta:
Traffic, Engagement, And Conversions
MoM Social Traffic Growth
Traffic from reviews makes up a big portion of eCommerce stores overall traffic. Likewise, adding social endorsements increases total social media traffic.
We did an analysis of our entire database and found that reviews are directly accountable for an average of 6% of all the traffic coming from Facebook, and about 20% of all stores’ Twitter traffic.
increase in traffic from Twitter after sharing reviews
increase in traffic from Facebook after sharing reviews
On average, businesses see:
How much of a store’s total traffic can be attributed to reviews?
26% 6%
Visitors coming from social channels are notoriously distracted. Luckily, you can increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site by doing nothing more than adding reviews.
Reviews increase the effectiveness of your social reach by harnessing the power of social proof and word-of-mouth marketing to increase trust among potential shoppers.
Adding reviews to Twitter boosts time on site by
Adding reviews to Facebook boosts time on site by
How Reviews Impact Social Engagement
Adding social proof increases the amount of time shoppers coming from social engage with your site.
35% 9.9%
How Reviews Increase Time on Site
While social media is primarily effective for building brand awareness rather than earning direct
conversions, it’s also effective for driving sales.
And reviews help your social efforts earn the most sales.
According to a recent study on social by Shopify, the average conversion rate for Facebook is 1.85%, the average conversion rate for Twitter is 0.77%, and the average rate for LinkedIn is 0.47%.
Our data scientists found when reviews are shared to social, the conversion rate is an average of 40%
higher for Facebook, 8.4 times higher for Twitter
How Reviews Impact Social Conversation
CVR of Reviews Shared to Social
This is a rebuttal that comes up often, but we’ve got news for people who don’t think reviews matter for social:
Even if you’re a smart marketer, you’re stupid to not take advantage of reviews on social.
Getting customers to write and share reviews on social is a critical yet often overlooked tactic in social marketing - but the data shows stores who don’t take advantage of this are missing out on traffic, boosted engagement, AND sales.
Unfortunately though, if you’re not already taking advantage of using reviews on social, you’re not alone. Our data scientists studied how conversion rate compared to use, and found the majority of marketers are not taking advantage of using reviews on social - which means you have the opportunity to gain an upper hand on your competitors.
But you’d better hurry - Sharing reviews on social is a growing trend, and you should be ahead of your competition.
“But we’re already doing fine
with social marketing.”
Reviews shared on social have the highest growth rate of all traffic channels. Among our users, we have seen a 405% year-on-year growth in user reviews that were shared to social media.
It’s important to catch the tide before you’re left behind.
Plus, reviews only add to your existing social marketing efforts.
Adding customer endorsements to social media pages increases the number of likes on social media pages.
For stores who added reviews, Facebook likes increased by 270% during 2014 (from 26.6M to 98.3M likes). The amount of likes for their
customers’ Twitter page followers have increased by 150% during 2014 (from 4.2M to 10.5M)
How Reviews Boost Social Likes
Part 3
Best Practices To Get Awesome Results From Marketing With Reviews
Share your best reviews on your business pages to show off happy customers:
For an added bonus, add a personal “Thank you” to the customer who left it to reach gain the attention of the customer and their social connections.
Ask your customers to share reviews:
Coupled with coupons, this strategy not only brings new traffic but also entices past customers to come back to redeem their discount and shop again.
Use reviews in your advertising:
Facebook ads with review content have:
