Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Sometimes it can be a challenge to get your team to support social media marketing. Either they view it as spam or something they just don’t know much about. Our garden centers rolled out a Social Media Challenge this spring to ramp up our marketing efforts. Since photos are the most popular items in social media right now, we challenged our managers to share photos from their location on an assigned day monthly. This challenge helped me stay efficient with my time since traveling to eight garden centers all over central Pennsylvania would be time consuming. This also gave us a chance to showcase how creative our staff is by sharing each locations unique custom designs and displays of product. As the weeks went on and the challenge evolved our team began to give more than just photos… they shared ideas for future blog posts, how to videos, garden tips and told me all about what’s new in store. This helped me better promote the material. Our staff are experts in their field and using their words and advice was a much more accurate than simply Googling any garden topic. We were able to use this content on a variety of marketing layers from QR Codes in our circulars to our weekly eblast to customers to inspiration on Pinterest boards. It was very successful and rewarding to see our customers interact online with these elements, so I shared the comments and results with our managers each month. My best advice on how to get started with your own social media challenge: 1. Participation Assign a manageable time on a calendar for employees to collaborate with you and send ideas. Letting your employees share how to… and acknowledging that they’re the expert. It really drives enthusiasm! 2. Give ownership Let employees suggest ideas for future posts/blogs, photos and content. I usually suggest about two topics and let the third one be collaborative. 3. Show results Send a follow up with a Thank You and include examples of where you’ve used their photos/content and the analytics of its success. For example: If you filmed a video with them share how many people have viewed it, and the link. What methods have you used to try to get your employees and team on board with your digital marketing efforts? Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on Inkling Media and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage Author: James Spillane James is a BSc Physics grad, attending Imperial College London and becoming interested in the gambling industry around the time of the online poker boom. His previously published work can be found on Rakeback.com and more recently InsideBitcoins.com and DeFicoins.io. Currently James is a content editor and writer covering Bitcoin … View full profile ›More by this author:Metaverse P2E Games Token IBAT Lists Today on Pancakeswap 16:00 UTC / GMTBC.GAME Releases An NFT, The Degen PassWhy is Crypto Up Today? Best Coins to Buy for 100x Gains