No one is queuing for this...

You see an advert go by that appeals to you. You're about to click. And then your eye catches the comments: zero likes, zero comments, nothing.

What does that do to your confidence in what it says? Exactly. Suddenly you're on your guard. And your customers experience the same thing with your advert.

Why an empty reaction counter does so much damage

On social media we are used to good posts getting reactions; the algorithm sees to that. That expectation is so deeply ingrained that its absence becomes information. Not a single like does not read as “nobody has seen it yet”, but as “apparently others thought nothing of this”.

That is social proof in its simplest form: when in doubt, people look at what others are doing. It works most strongly when someone is uncertain and the situation is new, and that is precisely the situation of someone seeing your brand for the first time.

The annoying thing is that this judgement is made before your text is read. Your ad can be completely correct in terms of content and still be written off based on a signal that has nothing to do with the content.

What you can do about it

Alongside your conversion campaign, run an engagement campaign on the same ad. Such a campaign focuses within your target audience on the people who are more inclined to like or comment. If your ad is somewhat interesting, you will get those reactions too.

Two things to know before you deploy this:

• It is not expensive, provided your ad is worth the reaction. An engagement campaign for a boring ad is money down the drain, because then you are buying reach without response.
• Do not judge the two campaigns by the same yardstick. The engagement campaign isn't generating any applications and shouldn't be judged on that metric. It does something else: it makes the conversion campaign more credible. Which numbers when saying something goes into more detail on that.

What you definitely shouldn't do

Buying comments from a service that provides likes. That is not only against the platforms' terms and conditions, it also backfires: those accounts don't fit your target audience and you can tell from the profiles. Visitors who click on them for a moment will trust you less afterwards than with zero likes.

Even collecting reactions that say nothing is pointless. Twenty thumbs-up from your own colleagues are no social proof for someone who doesn't know your business.

Social proof outside social media

The same mechanism works on your website, and you are entirely in control there. A case study page with real figures, a client name your audience recognises or a tangible result including the timeframe does what an empty review counter cannot. On our own cases it states for each result where it comes from, and that is precisely why.