Social Proof : Herd them hither
Social proof, also called as social influence, is what happens when humans are not able to decide the proper mode of behavior. Human beings look for reasons to do what they want to. On the internet, what happens is that people rely heavily on the wisdom of crowds. This means that when a huge mass of people are engaged to one specific entity, it gives credibility to that entity. And soon more and more people subconsciously join into that mass of people.
Effects of Social Proof
This is one of the reasons how promotion of content on sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com happens. It has been seen that content that has been seen, voted for, commented etc by a large number of people gains much more credibility in other people’s eyes as compared to content that seems to be lonely on the internet. This means that if you can create a high number of visual cues used to attract attention with either voting or commenting then you can have more and more users vote up your content.
There are a lot of other cues that draw more visitors to a website. The high number of website subscribers, the high number of visitors to a particular site, a high number of comments on any section of the site, high traffic website indication as given by alexa etc also helps.
Digg has an algorithm that discounts the weight of your regular friends and visitors’ proof as compared to new visitors that come to your website. So, your friends’ votes don’t count. But the important thing here is that your friends’ voted will attract more people and hence more votes. This is why it is important to engage in such social proofs for website promotion.
How to promote using Social Proof
While trying to manipulate public opinion, it is also important to remember that we need to be careful while creating our “social proof”. This means that if you do anything that is suspicious, you will be cast out immediately. If you have a huge number of people voting for your article, the moment you upload it one Digg, it means that there is something suspicious about it. Then, even if you have great content, you will be ostracized from the community.
It is also said that you must try and lead the conversation in the direction where you want it to go, rather than starting from there. You can do this by posing a controversial question in you comments or asking some of your friends to do so and the rest can move on from there.
Tags: Effects of Social Proof, How to promote using Social Proof, social influence
