###Social Media Question of the Week: How can I identify my brand ambassadors and get them to share my message?

We get asked this question a lot. And it makes sense.

Social media recommendations influence the perception of your brand and encourage others to buy from you. We all want to create a product or service that customers love and enthusiastically want to share with others. This loyalty is the ultimate win for any business because it means you are delivering on your brand promise. The question is how can you identify the key individuals who also have reach and influence?

###1. Define what a brand ambassador looks like for your business. Is it someone who:

• drives traffic to your website or store
• writes a positive review about your product or service
• likes you on Facebook, Follows you on Twitter, or signs up for your newsletter?
• is simply extremely satisfied and loves you and your product/service?

Ultimately, it is all of the above but once you identify your goals and what it means to be an ambassador, you will have a better understanding of what motivates your customers and fans to share.

###2. Listen

Listening is so powerful. If you have not done so already, create an account on Hootsuite or Bufferapp to share your best content, monitor the conversation and start to build your lists. You will soon discover your brand ambassadors, because they like to talk a lot and share your message with their audience. They will like your Facebook posts, mention you in a Tweet, email or DM you. Create a special list of the influencers that are interacting with your brand and sharing your content.

###3. Engage

Now that you are actively listening, and understand your audience a bit better - it’s time to engage and participate in the conversation to build on those relationships.

• Respond to all Tweets, Comments, Emails & DMs in a timely fashion.
• Be helpful and interesting and not salesy in your interactions.
• Share or highlight influencer content via social channels and/or your blog.

###4. Reward

Nurturing authentic relationships and building a community takes time but is so worth it. Once you create that connection and take the the time to get to know your brand ambassadors, you will understand what motivatives them. There are several ways to say thanks and reward them for the brand love:

• Exclusive or early access to your product, service or an event
• Discounts or special offers
• Social love in the form of sharing their content or featuring them on your blog or social media channels.
• Targeted giveaways or promotions

###5. Host A Promotion

Running contests and sweepstakes on a regular basis is a great way to encourage brand interaction, inspire more influencers to share your story and grow your audience. Strutta has a number of tools built in to encourage sharing and help you identify your brand ambassadors:

• Refer-a-friend for Sweepstakes allows you to grant one additional entry when a participant refers a friend.
• Share tools enable participants to share your promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and email
• Each user has a Participation score (scale of 1 to 10), which takes into account sharing activity, votes, entries etc. to help you identify your most active participants.
• Once you identify your brand ambassadors, you can send them personal messages using our messaging tool.

Note: Instead of offering just one Grand prize, consider offering multi-prizes during your promotion to reward your most active participants along the way.

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Building loyalty and your community is an ongoing process. Above are just a few ways to help you identify and reward your brand ambassadors but we would love to hear from you. How have you engaged and recognized your brand ambassadors? Share your tips and ideas in the comments below.

###Have a Social Media Question for Us?

Feel free to leave your question below, message us on Facebook or Twitter with your social media questions. We will answer them each week and feature you on our blog.