Leveraging Twitter for Social Proof

Dec 30, 2009

by Rob Capili

People hate ads. I know I do. Just the other day, I was online trying to find out why my Wii was not working. My son wanted to play Mario Kart, so he got the game, put it in the drive, and hit the power button. The power light on the console turned yellow, but no matter what we did, we couldn?t make it turn green.

After messing with the controllers and the connections for a while, we decided to look up the solution on Google. We found a site that looked like it had a good thread on the subject, so we went there. Unfortunately, when the page loaded, we quickly realized we had entered spambot hell.

The first thing we saw was an AdSense minefield. The information that we came for was completely hidden amongst a bunch of ads. Next, the site tried to launch a salvo of pop up windows. Finally, it dropped a modal dialogue asking me if I wanted to opt in to their list.

Thanks, but no thanks. I ctrl-W'd and got out of there.

On my work computer, that probably wouldn?t have happened. Between Firefox, NoScript, and Greasemonkey, you can insulate yourself fairly well from obnoxious advertising. However, this box was not as well protected.

Still, the experience got me thinking. As an internet marketer, I was intrigued by the approach these people had taken. I'm sure that in the short run, tactics like this can generate some money. But the approach has no long term viability.

Really, better ways abound to get people to do things.

Internet marketing is really about persuasion. Whether you want to get someone to buy something, believe something, or do something, your success hinges on your ability to persuade. If you freelance or run an online business, you already understand this.

But even as a developer, it is important to realize that the ultimate success or failure of a given project doesn't depend nearly as much on development as on successful marketing. The net is littered with the bones of brilliant technologies that never caught on, and cluttered with junk tech that somehow made it big.

So, suppose that you were an internet marketer, and you wanted to get people to opt in to your list. How would you go about persuading them to do it? One of the easiest ways to do this is to use something called social proof. Wikipedia defines social proof as "(a) psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior."

But that definition is overly complicated. Robert Cialdini, one of the leading authors on this topic, summarizes it by saying that "People will do things that they see other people are doing." But even that is more explanation than is necessary. The simplest way of understanding social proof it is through the kid's phrase, "Monkey see, monkey do". So how could you implement this for your projects? Let's look at a case study and see.

One of my clients, an artist that runs a high profile blog, gets a lot of organic search traffic, but has minimal Twitter presence. As part of his current marketing plan, he wanted to increase his presence on social networks. In particular, he felt that Twitter could help him to reach new people. However, he does not have a lot of time to tweet. He decided to get a head start by converting his existing web traffic into followers. So, he added some cute "Follow Us" buttons to his blog. He got some followers, but the conversion rate was very low. So, he contacted me to help him improve it. Enter social proof.

Remember the mantra "Monkey see, monkey do?" If you want someone to do something, show them a lot of other people already doing it. In this case, we want people to become followers on Twitter. So, we need to show them other people who already follow us.

Luckily, Twitter makes this easy.

Almost everyone on Twitter has a picture on their profile. If we could somehow display these pictures on the blog, it would most likely improve our opt-in rate. So, we need to get a list of followers.To see someone?s followers on Twitter, just add "/followers" to their Twitter URL. For instance, one of the profiles I help maintain is for a Brazilian Jiujitsu blog aggregator called BJJBlogs. The url to the profile is http://twitter.com/bjjblogs. To see the people following BJJBlogs, you would just add "/followers" to the url, like so: http://twitter.com/bjjblogs/followers

If you visit that profile, you will see a list of followers. Our goal is to take their pictures and display them on our site. Let's get started.

Twitter has been nice enough to provide us with an API that we can use to access most of the site's functions. So, instead of having to scrape the information (like in the old days), we can simply ask for it nicely, and Twitter will send us a beautifully wrapped XML document.

To make the request, we are going to will use CFHTTP, This is what the call will look like this:

Listing 1: CFHTTP Call to the Twitter API



<cfhttp url="http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?&lite=true"

method="get" username="" password="">

As you can see, we will have to supply four arguments in order to make our request. Let's discuss them in reverse order.

Three of the arguments are fairly straightforward. Username and password are the credentials that you use to log in to Twitter. You will fill that information in on your own. Method indicates the type of HTTP request, in this case a GET.

The URL that we use determines the information that Twitter sends back. In this case, we want to get a list of followers, so we have to send the following URL:


http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?&lite=true

To understand this call, let's break it down into parts:

http://twitter.com

This is the HTTP call.

/statuses/followers

This is the command. It tells Twitter what we are asking for. In this case, we are asking for a list of followers.

.xml

This indicates the format that we would like the results in.

&lite=true

This indicates the format that we would like the results in.

When you send this command to Twitter, it will respond with an XML document that contains information about the followers. But, before we can use that document, we must first parse it in ColdFusion, like this:

Listing 2: Parsing the XML


<cfscript>


_xml = XMLparse(cfhttp.filecontent);


</cfscript>

This will give us an XML document that we can actually use. I encourage you to explore the structure of this document and examine the information you have to play with. If you do, you will see that the profile image information is located here:


 
<users><user><profile_image_url></profile_image_url></user></users>

With that information in hand, we are ready to display the profile images. The full code for that is listed here:

Listing 3: Displaying the Images


 


<cfhttp


url="http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?&lite=true" 


method="get"


username=""


password="">
                                         

</cfhttp>





                         
<cfscript>


_xml = XMLparse(cfhttp.filecontent);


</cfscript>






<cfoutput>


<cfloop from="1" to="#arraylen(_xml.users.user)#" index="i">


<cfset _pic = _xml.users.user[i].profile_image_url.xmlText>


<img src="#_pic#" width="25" height="25" alt="#_name#">


</cfloop>


</cfoutput>

And voila! In just a few lines of code, you have instant social proof.

Of course, before rolling this feature out to production, the usual disclaimers apply. Since it uses a web-based API, make sure to play nicely. Cache your results, and only poll as much as is necessary. Add error checking and handling where necessary. And before broadcasting your Twitter credentials via GET, make sure to implement proper security.

If you would like to see a live demo of a slightly more advanced version of this code, you can visit http://www.widgetropolis.com/tools/twitter/twitterFollowers.cfm.

If you only take one thing away from this article, I hope it is that social proof is a powerful weapon that can increase your ability to persuade your visitors to take action. And it doesn't even take a lot of work. By leveraging existing assets, like your Twitter followers, and writing a few lines of code, you can increase your response rates tremendously. Monkey see, monkey do.

Rob Capili is the Director of Internet Marketing for 831 Digital. When he is not online, he enjoys teaching Salsa, training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and spending time with his beautiful children.

Leveraging Twitter for Social Proof

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