In the last post, we talked a bit about how staff should always motivate customers to share their awesome experiences online. Reviews and fan interaction makes the Google juice flow, and you want your cup to run over. The first thing we’ll focus on is getting the online interactions you REALLY need: from the fans.

If you can’t get your customer base interacting online, your social media campaign is less effective than it could be.

Worth the Effort

Generating fan action isn’t simple. While some people live to talk about how awesome your product is or their experience was, the average person doesn’t. They walk away satisfied and if it happens to come up, they may mention it to a friend. They mean well, but life is busy and they often forget to go back online and write a review. If they’ve never used a site like Yelp! before, they may be turned off by the registration process. There are tons of reasons this happens, and no way to account for them all.

However, there is one way to overcome it. Incentive. If you offer the customer a reward for participating online, you can easily overcome any reason to not do so. The greater the reward, the more likely the customer is to respond.

• A 15% discount will generate a few reviews, but a 25% discount will probably lead to more interaction than you can handle. However, you don’t want people spamming reviews for discounts, so you need to put a limit, such as one per customer or even one per review site.
• Offering deals for checking in on Foursquare is a common tactic, and is built right into the service. Try offering a bonus for anyone who writes a review or tip as well.
• Offer contests in your store to encourage people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook. Offer a reward after a certain number of followers is achieved.
• You can also offer rewards for people who Tweet about you.

All of these techniques will generate an increase in customer interaction. And if you keep maintaining contests and incentives for people to talk about you, you’ll certainly reap the rewards.

Aside from simple word of mouth, the more people talk about you, the more other people will notice. And increased traffic leads to increased social activity (tweets, likes, +1s, etc), which in turn is noticed by search engines, boosting your SEO results and driving more people to your site.

It’s all a big cycle and all you have to do is give it a little push now and again.

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