One of the key challenges in distributing content on social networks is to generate the initial critical mass of social sharing which can then result in a follow-on chain reaction. Engage.Social helps organizations to address this key step by providing a means to encourage, measure and reward the core group of active supporters.

Rewarding the Right Number of Ambassadors

Engage.Social clients have found that there is an optimal “sweet spot” in terms of the right number of social media ambassadors that should be rewarded for sharing an organization’s content. If you only reward, say, the top 1 or 3 sharers, many of the rest will not feel that they could ever be part of this “superstar” club, and may not be as motivated to participate. However, if too many people are rewarded (even those who only post once and have a few friends engage), then the program loses its value. An example of an optimal social sharing rewards program might be a large conference where maybe the top 1 or 3 ambassadors receive some kind of “grand prize”, but also the top 25 to 50 participants know they will also receive special recognition at the conference: perhaps their names will be displayed somewhere, their names called out on stage in the plenary session, and/or they are given a conference T-shirt or coffee mug.

Rewarding Effective vs Noisy Ambassadors

In designing a program to encourage social sharing for an event, it is important to focus on making sure that the sharing of content is effective instead of just noisy. Careless and noisy oversharing of content can in fact have a negative effect, as people within a social network will tune out or even shut off someone who over-shares. Engage.Social’s leaderboard algorithms make sure to measure and reward those users who share content effectively and generate actual social engagement (likes, shares and retweets etc) instead of just those who make large volumes of posts.

Optional Pushing Content to Ambassadors

In addition to encouraging advocates to visit the conference website and share content, Engage.Social can also be used to “push” content to advocates who would like to share content. One example of this is sending periodic newsletters by email suggesting trending content that ambassadors have not yet shared (Engage.Social will intelligently select only content that has not already been shared by that advocate). In addition, particularly active ambassadors may choose to enable Engage.Social to automatically share conference content on their behalf. One example of this is that, during the days of the actual conference when busy ambassadors may not have time to select and approve all content, they can allow the conference organizers to automatically retweet posts about the conference so that they can help make the conference content “trending” on networks like Twitter without any effort on their part. All these options are available in Engage.Social.