Yesterday I gave you a nifty idea for running an employee contest that would stimulate new online reviews. Today I'm giving you 3 more tactics on how you can use your employees as a social networking secret weapon...Continuing the trend of yesterday's reward based employee contest, this first tactic would also need to include another monthly employee reward.
Everyone likes to have their name turn up in the newspaper or headlines for good reasons. It's like getting your 15 minutes of fame. This next employee contest would require that the employee's name is mentioned in a blog post about your store.
Although I don't want to classify myself as such, "bloggers" are a dime a dozen now. Google's requirement to have fresh content all the time means ever business needs to have a blogger on staff. Other than that, millions of people have their own Tumblr, Blogger, Blogspot, and WordPress accounts. People simply like to hear themselves talk (or type).
Your employees just need to find one of those bloggers and have them write a post about the store. Hopefully the writer is an actual customer. The only requirements I'm going to suggest is that the employee's name is mentioned, and that the blog post link back to the jewelry store's website.
The blog will need to stay online for at least a month for it to help your online ranking. After 30 days you should reward your employee with something.
The next employee tactic is to have them tweet throughout their shift. They probably own smartphones already, and you should give them access to the store's Twitter account. When no one is in the store, they should tweet something about the store, a promotion, or a specific jewelry item.
Since tweets can contain images, you should have them snap quick pics of jewelry and share them through Twitter as well.
Speaking of jewelry pictures, let me introduce a topic that I'm not yet written in length about... Pinterest.
I've been actively tracking inbound website visitors from Pinterest since April 2012. I'm not about to draw any conclusions yet, but other agencies tracking Pinterest activity have found that more inbound traffic comes from random re-pinning of photos instead of the original photo pinned by a brand.
That said, you should ask each of your employees to "pin" product photos to Pinterest daily. You could ask them to use their personal Pinterest account or you could ask them to create a new "personal account" that they will use for business only.
If you are concerned about security then I suggest creating a Twitter account for the employee using their employee email address BUT a fictitious name; then use that employee Twitter account for Pinterest.
Throughout their work shift each employee should use their smartphone to take a jewelry photo using their smartphone and upload it to their Pinterest account. The description of the photo needs brief information about the jewelry item, the store's phone number, store's website address, and the (fictitious) name of the employee with directions to call and ask for the employee by name.
Make sure everyone knows the fictitious employee names and how to handle calls when they come in. This could be an extra incentive for employees who work on commissions.
