Adding some sort of social proof to landing pages is a great way to encourage people to consider trying or purchasing your product. That social proof usually comes by way of reviews and testimonials, and if you have ever tried to ask people for these you’ll know it can be a slow process.
If your customers are active on Twitter however it is likely there are plenty of completely unsolicited reviews and comments being posted. Why not make use of these on your site, as proof of how people use your product and what they think about it?
Back in 2010 I wrote about how we use our Twitter favorites over at Perch to add a randomly selected testimonial to the footer of the Perch website. This is something we still do, using our own Perch Twitter app to collect the tweets, cache them locally and display them. It’s got a little harder to do this than it used to be, however if you use Perch our Twitter App now allows you to authenticate with Twitter to grab the tweets and use them.
I’ve also started using tweets on my presentation pages on this site – you can see them on the page for my Grid Layout presentation. I tend to do talks on a particular theme, then collect all of the resources for the different times I have spoken on that subject on a page on this site. I’ve started adding the tweets from the audience to those pages. They give a conference organizer who might be thinking of asking me to speak an idea of what attendees get out of my talk.
Over on the Perch site I have some landing pages. We use these when we advertise Perch in order to create a landing page tailored to that audience. You can take a look at the one for the Unfinished Business podcast, where I’ve tried to pick out tweets that would interest the audience of freelance designers and developers who listen to that show.
I love using Twitter in this way as I feel that reviews that have been solicited, no matter how genuine they are, can look a bit like the answer to the question, “do you like my product/talk/book?” With tweets you can capture the thoughts of people as they use and have success with your product, right at the time they are using it. That’s a very powerful and genuine way to demonstrate that people find value in what you do.