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Social Proof Challenges for bloggers

by joekoffi
5 replies
If you are a blogger, you will agree with me that showing evidence of social proof (subscribers, followers, fans, tweets, likes, comments and other social shares) is one key to increasing visitors' confidence. In fact, if I visit a blog that doesn't have some of these stats or low stats figures, without even thinking, I'll immediately have the impression that this blog is not known. But a few things is challenging these figures and making them lose their real sense of representation:
- Buy of Twitter followers (not really people who follow your blog)
- Buy Facebook Fans (Not really fans of your blog)
- Buy traffic (most often, fake traffic to increase Alexa ranking)
- Etc

I'm beginning to think, what really is it that shows the real popularity of a blog? Comment counts ?
#bloggers #challenges #proof #social
  • Profile picture of the author plepco
    Comments are a huge indicator. The comments show real people who are interested - which leads to more people being interested and involved.
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  • Profile picture of the author RHert
    You have to make sure the comments are real though. There are so many spammers for the comment threads it's sad.
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  • Profile picture of the author TryBPO
    We just made a point on our blog of highlighting our social proof, actually. We:

    1. Highlighted comments on each article. Previously, they were buried in the bottom corner but we made a colored bubble to make it much more obvious. We get quite a few comments and it's something to show off.

    2. Put our feedburner subscribers at the top. We hadn't shown this previously and it was mentioned to us that 1,600+ subscribers was pretty good and if others knew we had that, they might be more interested in signing up.
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  • Profile picture of the author MarketingChad
    Social signals are definitely still in the early testing stages for SEOs for sure but there is evidence and it has been stated by Google that they do take these things into acount.

    I have recently been experimenting with buying +1s and Facebook likes from Fiverr. It's cheap and isn't going to do any harm. I found that just that alone isn't enough to push any sort of drastic ranking change but if you combine that with other link building, it definitely strengthens your credibility and is essentially just another kind of link diversification.

    I think it's still too early to tell what exactly Google is looking for since I think they are still figuring it out themselves. I think if you're setting up fake accounts all on your IP and just using them to like or +1 things that is obviously not good.

    But if you pay legitimate users of social networks to like your page, it will certainly look natural. That's why things like YouLikeHits.com and addsocials.com can work.

    While I don't think it's going to cause anything drastic to your site, every little bit certainly helps.
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