Social media has begun to influence the way we think, the way we behave and even the way we purchase and understand products. These views and opinions about products are based on reviews that we believe are prudent and reliable.
However, they may necessarily not be what we are looking for, as each person’s tastes differ and no two people can be same. With that in mind, Yotpo helps you make informed decisions about purchases based on what it calls the first ever social review experience. The site connects your social media accounts like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Foursquare to fetch reviews that your friends or your friends’ friends or 3rd degree contacts have written. Post web 2.0, everyone writes reviews about products that they use, and they end up blurting out what they feel across social media.
No matter where people who matter to you write those reviews, Yotpo recognizes them as people that might be within your online social hub, and brings results that are socially most relevant to you. The assumption here is that if people in your social circle mattered, you would tend to be influenced by their buying choices as well. Even from a consumer psychologists’ point of view, people tend to get influenced by their friends when it comes to making purchase related decisions. The influence could be a conscious attempt to seek a safer ground and purchase what others have already bought, or an unconscious need to imitate.
Whatever the need might be, we tend to depend on people who matter to us for reviews concerning gadgets, products or even services. Yotpo can in fact help you to curate products and services that you might want to buy, instead of scrounging through the net for reviews and getting lost in a sea of them. We all have experienced days of frustration when choosing the right product have been difficult, especially when everyone praises a product, or everyone lambasts it.
With the assumption that we tend to believe the reviews of those who are in our cliques than the reviews of unknown bloggers, Yotpo is set to launch what it calls a social review app. Apart from helping you read reviews within your social graph, it also influences your own social credibility and graph, depending on the reviews that you have written in the past. You could influence your friends too, in helping them make better shopping decisions. You could also read about how social media might help us in times of Personal Emergency.
