Your employees should be your biggest brand advocates, however, getting your employees engaged on social media can be difficult. Regardless of your industry, your employees are valuable assets in building brand awareness on social media. Even if your employee’s are reluctant to post about your company, engage with your brand’s social content, or to just follow your company’s social channels – there are still ways you can engage your employees on social media.
As engagement on social media becomes increasingly crucial for brands to be successful, you’ll want to use all resources you have available to grow your engagement rate. By leveraging passionate employees with strong social channels you can grow your brand awareness and your company culture in one.
Here are our top four ways to help get your employees more engaged on your brand’s social media channels
Incorporate Employee-Written Blog Posts Into Your Content Strategy
Blogs are extremely valuable for brands. They can help build your SEO, show your brand as a thought-leader in the industry, and even empower your employees. By letting your employee’s voices be heard through your brand’s blog, you can easily develop content for your site and social networks.
We suggest starting with a monthly blog content calendar where you can set topics and due dates with each of your employees. By allowing employees to write about relative topics that they are actually interested in, with specific due dates and timelines, you can efficiently and effectively develop an impressive blog for your brand but also an impressive amount of social content.
Related: 7 Tips to Make Sure You Never Run Out of Blog Topics
Blog articles should always be shared to your brand’s social media pages. Sharing this content is important because it provides a resource to your customer-base without asking for a sale. Blog content is a great way to drive additional traffic to your website from social media. Additionally, when an employee takes the time to write a blog post, they’re going to be proud of it. Chances are, they’ll share it with all of their friends and family to read…on social media.
Share Your Employee’s Accomplishments
If you want your employee’s to be socially proud of your company, then your company should be socially proud of it’s employees. By sharing individual employee accomplishments you can motivate your employees to feel more personally attached to your brand. Additionally, since social media is a bit of a “brag-worthy” outlet, your employee will be likely to share their accomplishment with their friends and family too.
These employee accomplishments can be anything from featuring an Employee of the Month, to showcasing employees that have won awards or been mentioned in top publications. Even sharing ways that individual employees have gotten involved in the community can be a great way to grow your social engagement among employees while building your brand’s culture and reputation.
Related: How Awards Can Benefit Your Company
Don’t forget about company wide accomplishments either! If your company wins any type of award for your products or services, or even a great PR hit, share it! Even in less-social industries, company wins become wonderful social content. Employees will be more likely to share about a company that they are proud of – so give them social content to brag about!
Incentivize Employee Social Engagement
Social contests work extremely well for brands to build their engagement. It’s no surprise that they even work well for getting your employees engaged on social media. Run monthly or quarterly contests where you award the most socially active employee (i.e. those who share the most content, or mention your brand the most times).
Related: The Best Instagram Contest for Your Brand
When it comes to social contests, repetition is key. With so many untrustworthy contests and social outlets, it can be hard for social users to narrow down legitimate opportunities to win. This may even be the case with your employees. Depending on the size of your company, you might not notice many entries the first time around due to the “what are the chances I would even win” mentality. However, after you pick, and announce company-wide, your first winner, you’ll notice an increase in entries. The prize can be something as simple as a gift card to the favorite, local coffee shop or even a cash bonus!
Give Your Employees Assets To Share From
Make it as easy as possible for your employees to get involved on social media. The best way to do this? Give your employees a bank of content to share from. While this strategy doesn’t necessarily help your brand’s social channel engagement rates, it does help build brand awareness without needing to develop any additional content – just use what you were already going to post!
If you have a certain landing page or campaign (say, recruitment) that you are hoping to fuel, develop branded content promoting these strategies that are already optimized for social media. Include suggested captions, landing page links, and posting instructions if applicable. Share this folder with your entire company and continue to add to it on a monthly basis. This can help you make sure that your branding is always accurate and the message being said about your brand is a positive one.
This strategy is another great way to incentivize your employees for their social sharing. For example, whoever shares the most content from this folder each month could win a prize. If you continue to add new content to this folder each month, then you can easily make this a long term strategy.
Wrapping Up
If you are struggling to build your brand’s following or engagement rate, relying on your employees can be a great place to start. While employee engagement on social media may take a bit of extra coaxing, with a few unique strategies to can efficiently increase your employee engagement on social media.