Aileen Bollan
Most, if not all, of your staff will have social media accounts. What if you could get all of your staff to like and share your business’s social media posts?
Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and many more social media platforms are driving customer decisions. Messages and posts that come from friends and colleagues tend to be considered more trustworthy than something from a faceless corporate account. If your team members share updates and messages with their own social media networks, there is an opportunity for your firm to build brand awareness and trust with a whole new audience.
The numbers tend to make a compelling argument. Let’s say your firm has 1,000 followers on LinkedIn and 50 staff. If each of your staff had 100 connections on LinkedIn, and they all liked, shared and commented on your firm’s posts, your social media marketing reach would go from 1,000 potential views to 6,000.
In order to achieve this level of social media engagement, your employees must want to share your content. You can’t make them do it. If your people are engaged and enthusiastic, then helping the company get the word out, via social media isn’t a huge ask. At the same time, by sharing relevant messages, employees can ideally build their own profile. This can help them to build their reputation in their professional network.
You should also consider your target audience. Every member of your team may not necessarily have social media contacts that are interested in your product or service offering. For example, if your firm sells mining equipment, then there is no point in reaching out to people who work in the food-manufacturing sector. It may be useful to build a profile of your ideal target audience. Then consider who in your team has a network that matches that profile. You can then set about encouraging those team members to engage with your social media content and share it with their own networks.
In order to get the most out of your staff and their social media engagement, you should create some in-house training and some guidelines, which explain how you would like your people to talk about your brand on social media. It is important that your company has a social media policy that staff is aware of and adhere to. Even the best intentions can go awry, this blog is a good example of that!
In order to get the most out of your staff social media campaigns, you should assign someone with an appropriate skill set to create social media messages for the firm and then make it easy for your staff to like, share and post a message on their social media accounts. The easier you make this process, the more likely you are to be successful.
Finally, think about how you reward those who engage the most with your social media campaigns. For example, you could have a monthly award of a bottle of champagne for the person who gets the most social media hits for the firm.