How to Use Customer Reviews in Paid Social Creative

5 min readAug 13, 2018

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a few clients ask about featuring customer reviews in their paid social campaigns. So I thought I’d put together a quick guide on how to leverage customer reviews in paid social creative.

Reviews can be a powerful tool for competitive differentiation. However, reviews can also be a make-it-or-break-it factor for ecommerce brands– especially if the company is not well known. In an Ecommerce Insights Survey conducted by eMarketer last month (below), it was found that nearly 40% of internet users often reference product reviews before making a purchase. As more big-box companies realign their infrastructure to sell directly online, product reviews will be more critical than ever.

The Legalities

Customer reviews are considered to be a form of user-generated content (UGC), so similar rules apply.

Before including a customer review in your ad campaign, make sure you have a clause in your site Terms and Conditions and/or Privacy Policy that any user reviews submitted to your website can be used for marketing purposes.

Below is an example of what Casper and Hims are using in their site Terms and Conditions. Personally, I prefer the Hims legal language because they explicitly call out the usage of UGC on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

https://www.forhims.com/terms-and-conditions

If you don’t have a clause in place yet and there’s a review you really want to pull from your website, direct message the customer and ask for their permission.

If you find a testimonial about your product on a review site (yelp, google reviews, etc.) don’t copy and paste it into your content doc! Most review sites have a clause in their Terms of Service stating that user-generated content (such as reviews or testimonials) is owned by the user and licensed to the website. Which means if you grab that review, even if it’s about your product, you could be infringing on the intellectual property rights of the person who wrote the review. In short, save yourself some trouble and don’t even think about it.

Considering all of the above, I highly recommend including a clause in your site Terms to expedite the customer approval process.

How to Select Reviews

Selecting the best review can quickly become a daunting task. Here are some of my hard and fast rules for selecting the right testimonial copy:

Keep it short. In my experience, quick social ad copy performs better than long form.
Find the right voice. Make sure the voice and tone of the review align with your brand and audience.
Use top-rated products. Use reviews of your top-rated products to attract new visitors to your site. We’re talking about your tried and true products here.
Retarget with brand reviews. If you’re layering in retargeting for the users who left your site without converting, use reviews that praise the brand/quality/service. Depending on their values, this may entice the user to come back and buy.
Avoid obnoxious punctuation. Meaning, don’t use reviews that include multiple exclamation points!!!!!! Over-enthusiastic punctuation can come off as fake, or spammy if you’re using plain text copy.
Keep it experience-based. Try to find descriptive reviews including the pronoun “I” that illustrate a feeling or sense of fulfillment. For example, “It felt like I was sleeping on a cloud.” Or, “The summer surprise I didn’t know I needed.” These are more relatable than stale reviews like… “Service and product were great and met expectations.”
Try something more visual. If you have it written in your Terms clause (like Hims, above), you can also use UGC testimonial imagery mentioning your product– such as unboxing videos and etc.
Test organically. I know reach is just about non-existent for Facebook business pages, but try testing review-based creative organically first to see if it resonates with your audience — then put some budget behind it accordingly. If this is a new approach, consider the organic test as a proof-of-concept before allocating dollars.
Be real. Don’t fake your testimonial copy. It will come off inauthentic, and it won’t work. Then you’ll feel really embarrassed.
Log it. Just in case you need it, keep a log of all reviews used in campaigns. You may or may not need to dig it up later.