An Easy Way to Boost Social Media Word-of-Mouth

Customers are lazy people; there are not many of them who will go out of their way to aid your brand, unless there is a large enough incentive to do so. We've taken care of the incentive in previous posts about making customers proud to support your brand and creating experiences that translate into good stories. So let's move onto the easier portion: removing the part where the customer has to go out of their way to support you.

Clearly, more people will share if you make it convenient for them. For example, Nike+ GPS, Nike's latest running app, allows users to automatically share the details of their latest run. So users feel the pride of publicizing their fitness and it's easy for them to do so.

On the other hand, while automated sharing can be convenient, status updates or tweets that sound canned do not resonate. Allow users to customize their sharing, in order to let their own authenticity shine through. If this is not practical, add a little bit of flair or personality to the automatic sharing.

Once you integrate some programming that makes sharing easy, you'll be well on your way to achieving the buzz that you've been looking for.

For more posts on promoting social media buzz, go to the sharing portal.

Creating Funny Experiences to Generate Social Media Buzz

Facebook users love to entertain their friends. We'll share jokes, funny stories, and odd things that we notice with life. Why not make your brand one of these interesting or amusing status updates, that are the lifeblood of Facebook and Twitter?

Use either your product or your marketing to create experiences that don't happen every day. There are no boundaries on what you do, as long as it's unique enough to solicit an emotional reaction. This reaction can be surprise, laughter, the classic "awwww... that's so cute," or anything else that resonates with your target audience.

Burger King made people laugh with the interactive "Subservient Chicken" marketing campaign. Basically, this campaign was a website where users would see a video of a man dressed as a chicken; they could type in commands to get him to do things like "peck ground" or "walk like an Egyptian" (all pre-recorded, of course).

The entertainment value of this website triggered sharing and word-of-mouth like no traditional advertisement could ever dream of doing. Meanwhile, it furthered Burger King's brand of "having it your way" and drove up profits by 30%.

Stores should use the intimate environment that they create to form these interesting experiences. Imagine how many teenage girls would scream their heads off on Facebook and Twitter if, at Abercrombie or Hollister, the models (or even just the attractive-enough employees) started talking to them.

Take these examples and adapt them to your business, to generate the buzz your revolutionary idea needs.

For more posts on promoting social media buzz, go to the sharing portal.