When it comes to elevating your company’s name on social media platforms, your employees can help with this effort. Your staff can be brand ambassadors by sharing your company’s posts with their friends, family, and followers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Tumblr. To engage your employees effectively, you can’t bombard them with requests to share posts. Instead, you can look for ways to effectively engage with them so that they’ll naturally want to share positive information about what’s happening with your company.
Most of your team members already have accounts on multiple social media platforms. They’ve established connections with people, many of whom they know personally, and have earned their trust. Even if they have followers they don’t know, chances are good that they’re connected because of some common shared interests. Consider these ways to leverage your employees’ social media capital to promote your company. Just remember that it’s bad form to require employees to promote your company on their personal social media accounts.
Ask employees to connect to your company’s social media presence
On Facebook, ask your employees to like your company’s page and list your company under the Work section of their personal profiles. Encourage your workers to follow your company on Twitter. For LinkedIn, request that employees list your company as their current employer on their profile page and follow your company.
Encourage staff members to share relevant posts
While it might be tempting to ask your employee network to share everything you post on your company’s social media pages, resist the urge to make this kind of demand. For one thing, it doesn’t help your company if your employees basically spam their followers and friends with a bunch of posts about their employer. Instead, encourage your staff to share posts about your company that they think will be relevant to their social media audience.
By being selective in what they share, your employees increase the likelihood that their followers will actually pay attention to the post. Social advertising only works if the content touches people in your company’s target audience, that is, people who care about your service or product. People tend to tune out a continuous flood of irrelevant posts, whether they’re on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.
Give your team promotional materials to feature on social media
Does your company have cool promotional items? If so, put them in your employees’ hands. Make it clear that you’d like to see them get creative and photograph themselves with these giveaways. For example, several people might post photos of themselves at a work lunch, and they just happen to be wearing t-shirts with your company’s logo on them.
Let your staff photograph your products
Give your employees some products and ask them to photograph it in unusual settings and share on Instagram. You can even offer a prize for the photo that earns the most likes or comments. By adding a competitive element, you’ll boost your team’s creativity. All the while, they’re creating great social content featuring your products and sharing the photos with their followers. You can also let employees take your product with them on vacation. Encourage them to photograph the product in whatever exotic locations they visit and share the images on social media.
Using your employees for your social media strategy
There are steps companies can take to leverage their employee network as a part of their social media strategy. From training to special offers for employees to share, there are many tactics you can use to get staff members excited about sharing your content.
Provide employees with social media training
To help employees understand your social media strategy and how they fit into the big picture, you need to provide them with training. You can offer a brief video for them to watch or you can provide an hourlong in-person session.
During training, you should communicate your expectations around social media usage as it pertains to talking about your company. Ground rules can help your team understand how they can be good brand ambassadors. In addition, the training should emphasize that content sharing is voluntary, and employees should only share company posts that are relevant to their connections on a particular social media platform.
Finally, the training should help employees understand how to network within the industry on social media. Help them find groups on LinkedIn for people in your industry who do similar work. Not only is this a great way for your employees to learn from their peers, but it can be a way to make your company’s name prominent within the industry.
Make sharing quick and easy
To encourage your employee network to share content and be a brand evangelist, you have to make it easy for them to get involved. With tools like DrumUp, employees can access an RSS feed of the company’s blog. If a post catches their eye, they can share it on their social media platforms.
You may want to train employees how to use tools that let them schedule posts across multiple social media sites. HootSuite is a popular option. It lets you create posts and then set them to show up on your various accounts at designated times.
Feature employees in your social media posts
Staffers like to see stories about their co-workers and may be more inclined to share this content, especially if it has a human interest tone. Your company should tag the person who’s featured in the photo or blog post. The employee you feature is likely to have friends and family who will also post the content on their Facebook walls or put it in a tweet for Twitter. Be sure to photograph your employee in his or her workspace doing something fun.
Give your team members a special offer to share
Everyone loves a good deal. So, give your employee network coupon codes that they can share on social media. A “friends and family discount” is a great way to encourage employees to do some social advertising that may bring you a flurry of fresh leads. If you give each employee his or her own coupon code, you can track which employee’s code earns the most sales. At the end of the promotional period, give a prize to the staff member whose code brought in the most dollars. Of all the social media content your company can ask employees to share, a discount is sure to be popular.
Companies that use employees in their social media strategy
Some companies are on the cutting edge of using their employee network as a key component of their social media strategy. Take a look at these examples; you might learn a new strategy that you can incorporate into your social advertising plan.
Warby Parker
As an eyewear company, Warby Parker wants to appeal to people who want fashionable glasses at a great price. The Instagram account features fun videos of in-store staff members wearing their products. In a recent post, employees of a new store in Los Angeles were wearing glasses and being playful. The post also included a contest encouraging Instagram users to create their own zany video. After only three days, the post had more than 12,500 views. There’s no doubt would-be customers appreciated seeing the company’s employees having a great time while wearing stylish glasses.
L’Oreal
The beauty and skin care company, L’Oreal, created hashtags for employees to use when talking about the company on social media. As a result, employees began sharing positive photos and experiences using #LifeatLoreal and #LorealCommunity. Most of the posts garnered attention from people near and far; engagement with the posts skyrocketed and attracted strong interactions across multiple social media platforms. It was a great opportunity for the company to build its brand through its employee network.
Nokia
While most companies have guidelines that spell out how workers should talk about the company in social media, Nokia allows employees to share their personal opinions about the company online. Because of this, many employees freely jump into conversations on social media about Nokia. The telecommunications company works hard to maintain a positive culture for its employees so they’ll be enthusiastic brand ambassadors on social media.
Each company is unique and has its own social media strategy. Regardless of the size or industry, each company can transform its employee network into a well-informed group of social media savvy marketers. It requires training, a clear social media policy, and a plan for engagement to get your employees to help with your social advertising.