Is your firm taking advantage of employees being active on social media? Not enough firms leverage their employees to help with their marketing. One study found while 98% of employees use social media for personal use, in the US, just 27% of people use these platforms for work.
If you aren’t actively working to encourage employees to be active on social media, you’re missing out on the opportunity to attract and retain:
- Talent
- Clients
Employees are an integral part of your social media marketing because they have unique views and perspectives that they can share with the world. If their friends that they graduated with (and others in their network) see their posts on the latest cutting-edge project that they’re working on or how great it is to work at your firm, you’re likely to attract top talent to your firm.
But how do you get your team to become your mini social media army?
I’m going to share a few tips that have worked exceptionally well for us when trying to get employees actively engaged for our clients. These are methods that we know work time and time again.
PS. Don’t have the time or patience to focus on your social media? Click here to let us do the heavy lifting for you.
5 Ways to Get Your Employees Active on Social Media in 2023
1. Start With the “Tone at the Top”
If your business’s last post on social media was three years ago and your leaders are not on social media, you will face an uphill battle to get your employees on board.
Why would your employees post content if you aren’t?
If you want employees to post multiple times a week about the projects they’re working on or about an event that they’re attending, you must do the same. Leadership that is hands-on with its social media content will have a much easier time setting the tone for the rest of the team.
2. Build a Creative Culture and Space
Employee advocacy, or having your team post about their work and your business, requires:
- Creative culture
- Creative space
Creating content takes a lot of creativity. If you want to promote a creative workplace, you don’t want employees to question every post they make. Your employees need creative freedom, within reason, and there’s no quicker way to stifle this than with “negatively commenting on the posts the employee makes.”
Instead, let your team know that they’re a part of your firm’s marketing efforts.
Allow them a space and culture where people post about their exciting projects and receive a pat on the back for their efforts.
3. Gamify Social Media – Seriously
Gamification increases employee engagement by 48%. Additionally, 30% of people want to be more engaged when you gamify parts of the workplace. Use these statistics to your advantage by:
- Creating competitions around posting content
- Reward employees for their posts
- Add in team-building to improve inter-office relationships
For example, you can have two teams post content, and the team that receives the most engagement wins a free team lunch or dinner.
If you want to have solo gamification, you can put a leadership chart in the breakroom or on a central dashboard if you work remotely. When people see that someone has moved up in the ranking, their competitive nature will kick in and lead to them creating more content.
4. Add Time Into the Day for Creating Content
Creating content, posting and engaging with others who commented, liked or shared the post is time-consuming. Your employees want to be “off the clock” when they close their laptop for the day and will likely neglect these key aspects of social media unless it’s built into their day.
You can build time in the daily work schedule to encourage content creation.
If employees are already stretched thin, how can you expect them to start creating content? In fact, right this second, go through your calendar and try to identify the times of the day when everyone is dragging.
Perhaps Friday afternoons from 2 to 4 PM are slow, with everyone checking the clock and counting down the seconds before they can check out for the weekend. Schedule this otherwise unproductive time for content creation.
Your employees will appreciate the change of pace that content creation offers.
5. Train Your Team on How to Be Active on Social Media
Employee advocacy is too important to ignore training. I’m going to make this as simple as possible: would you invest in training if it increased profitability by 23%?
Absolutely!
Studies show that you’ll also improve your organic reach by 200% by having your team post on social media. Your employees are brand ambassadors, and you need to do a few things in training:
- Explain the type of content that your team can post
- Outline the projects and content that cannot be posted due to NDAs or other agreements
- Train employees on how to use social tools
For example, if you have Hootsuite and give access to your employees, you can train them how to schedule posts and find hashtags to use in their content. Training modules that explain how, what and when employees can post about their work will help you make the most out of your team’s reach.
You should also create a list of resources on what content works best on which social platforms to help educate your employees on current best practices.
Social media reaches 4.9 billion people. With more than half of the world’s population on these platforms, you cannot ignore them in your firm or business. Your target demographic is on social, and you need to find a way to reach them.
You can pay for ads and use your company account, but it’s time to do more – your competitors are.
If you want to increase your social media presence exponentially and get in front of more eyeballs, you can use your employees to help you reach your goal. Content creation is one of the most powerful tools in the marketing world. You can turn each employee into an extension of your brand to generate new clients and even talent leads.
The tips above are the foundational steps we take to help clients just like you get their employees active on social media. Over time, you’ll begin to reap the benefits of an internal marketing team consisting of the hires you’ve already made.
Schedule an introductory call with us today if you want to learn more about getting employees active on social media.
