Facebook Like Page Post Tips, Part 7 of 13, Collect Testimonials

Why do companies hire celebrities to promote their products?  I used to wonder what the true value of this was.  When I was young, I thought certain people were hired because they “were like us” and would mispronounce words like “die-uh-BEET-us.”  The people hired tended to be older and also were featured prominently on TV shows.  I was

Who do you think of when you see oatmeal?

astonished that people would buy a product simply based on a recommendation from someone they don’t know. (There is usually a disclosure that even says these people are PAID endorsers of the product.)

As I got older, I realized what was going on.  Rather than the CEO or the VP of marketing getting on the tube to pitch the products, they chose to go with someone who would be trusted by the target market.  In a large, diverse market audience, it is difficult to find a person who is personally known to viewers.  So, they go for the next best thing, the person who shares one’s living room, albeit through a one way communication device.

The 3rd party testimonial is certainly the way to go to promote your business.  The nice thing about Facebook is that the system is designed around the 3rd party testimonial.  Creating a Facebook Like page for your business is repackaging your business as a social structure that people can engage with more readily.  Getting people to support and promote your business is part of the social structure.  Here are some of the mechanisms for generating and using testimonials for your business from your customers:

1. Ask your customers to post on your wall.  If someone posts on your page wall, a notification goes out to the real time news feed of all of their friends and a link to the post appears on the person’s profile. This provides an opportunity for new people to see your business and get connected with you.
2. Ask for recommendations. There is a spot on your page wall (on the right) to gather recommendations from your customers.  When one of them posts a recommendation, a notification is sent to all of their friends through the real time news feed.  The recommendation also appears permanently on your page for others to see.  Here is a link to one of my videos in which I talk about recommendations.
3. Get your customers to post a video testimonial on your wall.  Posting video on Facebook is easy, thanks to the prevalence of webcams and Facebook’s easy to use webcam interface, so take advantage of it.  People can connect better with the emotion in someone’s voice than they can text.  (Although I think you need both written and verbal testimonials.)
4. Create a custom landing tab with video testimonials. When someone visits your page and they have yet to live your page, you can send them to a different default landing tab.  You create a custom landing page to tell them about you and what benefit they will receive when they connect to your page.  If you have a brief testimonial from a client (30-45 seconds), the visitor can quickly get an idea of who you are and how you help people, and they get to hear it from someone other than you.

Take advantage of the idea that those TV ad wizards have known for years: people would rather buy based on someone else’s recommendation, even if they have no idea who that person really is.  Who knows, maybe that guy with “die-uh-BEET-us” really hates instant oatmeal?