You have a social media presence, but so do your competitors. How can you win the race for post views and likes? Your social media strategy should start with your employees. Leveraging your employees’ social media reach to distribute your company’s content is the smartest way to dramatically increase the number of people who read your posts.
The Advantages of Using Your Team for Social Networking
The number one advantage of tapping your team for internal social media management is that your employees are already on the payroll, so it will not cost you anything. Generating trust and engagement through internal social marketing is the fastest, most cost-effective way to build your social media reach. When your employees share your company’s updates and news using their personal social media accounts or link their profiles to your website, your business is able to reach a wide audience it wouldn’t be able to reach on its own.
Build it into the Job Description
Bill DeBoer, owner of DeBoer’s Auto in Hamburg, N.J., not only encourages employees to engage on social media, he’s built it into their job descriptions. “I require employees to maximize effectiveness by using dead time to curate and post socially on all of our networks,” he explains. DeBoer has assigned his college-aged receptionist to manage Pinterest and Instagram posts, while he and his office manager (Colleen LePera, pictured below) oversee Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ through Hubspot’s social tool. “We all have different avatars and therefore will curate/post different themes to hit a wider section of our customer base.”
Of course the caveat with any social media campaign is that in order for it to drive sales, it must consist of quality content. There’s simply no point in posting content that’s not engaging, helpful, useful, thought-provoking and/or interesting. Bombarding followers with meaningless fluff is a sure way to turn them off and achieve the opposite of your desired outcome.
Change Your Company’s Culture
Expanding your social media reach by encouraging your employees to share your news and updates may require an internal paradigm shift. Instead of banning social media on the job, you’ll need to embrace it. Make it fun! Why not hold a contest challenging employees to get the most “shares”?
To ensure everyone is on the same page, create guidelines on what company information is and isn’t appropriate to share. Consider devising a social-media “boot camp” of sorts to familiarize employees with the different social media platforms. Finally, make sure employees understand why they’re being encouraged to participate: messages disseminated by third parties (employees) are given more credence than messages disseminated by a company social media account. The bottom line? The more business you have, the more secure employees’ jobs are.
If you’re interested in learning how to recruit your employees to help your business broaden its social media reach, contact us at Business Actualization. We can help you craft social media guidelines and even train your employees on savvy social media use.
