Website Design Blog

Use Twitter for customer testimonials

It stops your customers doubting the authenticity of the testimonials on your website.

We’ve all experienced it, we’ve visited a website for whatever reason and we’ve been confronted with tacky sounding client testimonials, often featuring generic stock images of smiley happy people, and thought to ourselves, bull!

Well, at the very least, we’ve found ourselves automatically doubting the truth of what we have read. Did “Barry Parker” from “Doncaster” really have his “business saved” after purchasing this “absolutely awesome piece of software”. Well he may have, and the product may be truly awesome, but we have been desensitised to this type of promotion. We see it all the time but don’t have an independent way of verifying them.

So I was thinking, Twitter is quite popular right? so a lot of your customers probably use Twitter and if they are happy with your service……? you see where I am going with this.

Ask your happy customers (And there will be plenty I am sure) to save their time writing long winded testimonials gushing with complimentary adjectives (Which sound fake and very few people will EVER read) and instead send a 140 character tweet to all their fans saying how happy they are with your business.

Example of a Twitter testimonial

“just wanted to thank @designdoncaster for their fantastic service and helpful advice. I would definitely recommend. BIG UP”

Think how good this could be? some of your customers could have 100’s maybe thousands of followers on Twitter, all of whom will get to find out how ace you are. Probably a lot more then would read a testimonial on your website and definitely more who will see and believe. Makes sense!

Now you can get rid of the soggy testimonials on your website that no one buys and add a Twitter feed that pulls all your customer testimonials from Twitter and displays them anywhere you want on your website. People can even click on any of the comments and be taken through to your customer’s Twitter profiles for verification.

Ways to setup a Twitter testimonial feed on your website

Here are two ways of setting up the Twitter feed on your website which will only select the testimonials:

1. Set up a hash tag for your testimonials. The feed will only display tweets that include the tag. This would ensure that the process is totally automated but open to abuse.

2. Or create a “favourites” tweet folder in your account and have the feed draw from that. this requires a little bit more work from you in terms of having to add your testimonials to the favourites folder but you will not have to worry about any unwanted tweets appearing on your website.

Having the feed on your websites also helps to keep the pages (to a small degree) updated with fresh dynamic content.

It’s all good!

If you have any questions or thoughts on this please use the comments box below.

If you want me to post a “how to” on setting up a twitter testimonials feed on your website, please post the request below in the comments box and I will be sure to do it for you.

Bless ya

James