Spike your Engagement and Sales with Social Referral Marketing!

• We've been doing a good job following your advice and growing our social followings. We are tracking some very good shares from our product pages to Facebook, Twitter and others but I know we can do better. We would like to incentivize the sharing and take advantage of our rabid fan base. Can you recommend some software or sites that will help us do this?

Answer: Congratulations on your social media efforts so far and we applaud you for wanting to continue to incentivize your sharing where possible. As we are sure you've recognized, referral marketing is BEST done when it's done friend-to-friend and when some kind of reward for the share is involved.

In fact, the best incentivized reward programs actually make your customers fall farther in love with your brand. How do you do this? By providing a reward or incentive that is related to your business, is easily attainable, and is going to provide some value to the person sharing your site or product to their friends.

For example, if you are an online supplement store a possible reward for its members may be a free month's supply of a new hot supplement when you refer five people to buy a related supplement during a specific time, through a social media channel.

In contrast, let's say you were a clothing store and you were offering the same award above but increasing the required shares to twenty; this wouldn't be as effective. Not only is the barrier to achieve the award high and not easily attainable but the reward itself is not relevant to the target audience.

Fortunately, there are plenty of high-quality reward programs that make all of the above a snap. They provide customized templates, step-by-step advice on which rewards and offers will work best on your niche audience, and detailed ways to track and fine-tune your campaigns on-the-fly in real-time. If you want to incentivize your social sharing...