No brand today can undermine the value of social media- a popular marketing force these days. Whether you are running a small business or a multinational conglomerate, you need to encourage your employee to stay active on social media, especially on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. This post will tell you why it is essential to be on social media and handle this task efficiently. 

Why Do You Need to Encourage Employees About Social Media Promotion?

You have the company's social media account to connect with customers and amplify your brand presence. The question is why companies should involve employees. Well, employees are the human resource of your company. In this dynamic world where social media influencers are more powerful marketing resources than a marketing company, you need to learn how to make the most of this resource.

Attracting Top Talent: They work for your company and carry your brand name in their profiles and career. So, you can't overlook the fact that everything they say about your company would work as a review. For example, if an employee writes a positive review of your company's culture on social media. You would be able to have magnetic appeal from top talent. So, it's all about vocalizing the right words about your account and boosting social recruiting.

Using Employee Network: Every employee has a social gathering where he likes to work and has some recognition. So, when he talks about your company's product and services, it's a review, recommendation, or reference. Whenever a person wants to buy something new, he asks his friend. Thereby, getting employees on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter would help you utilize your employee's network. A simple post share is a recommendation of your employee in his friend circle. This direct friend's advice is always a more powerful marketing tool than an actual marketing campaign. Guess what! You have to pay zero dollars for getting this recommendation. Encourage your employee to stay active on his social media.

Twisting The Digital Habit of Your employee: Every company expects its employees to stay away from social media during work hours. There are many strict policies about social media usage. Despite all such policies, more than 70 percent of employees find a loophole in the system and still use social media secretively. Instead of asking them to stop using social media, companies should lift this digital ban and ask them to work on social media but more for the company's sake and interest. There is a need that companies put in place top-class social media policies for the mutual interest of both parties. 

Brand Visibility: Every brand wants to get visible, so one social account won't do the magic. You can capture a large portion of the digital market when every employee in your team plays his role, and this combined effort would help you capture attention from 10X social media users real fast. A single account sharing won't make a significant change overnight, but multiple accounts talking about the same topic can turn the table in one hour. 

Generating Lead: You put ads on your social account and generate leads. What about your employee's account? You may not set ads on their account. However, when they talk about your company and its unique products- you generate indirect leads from your employee's network. According to an estimate, every employee has 1000 plus contacts, so imagine getting attention from this many people.

13 Ways to Encourage Employees to Stay Active on Social Media

As you know the potential benefits of employee activities on social media, it's time to unlocks some ways through which you can make them keep sharing about your company's account and other details. 

1.Share a Clear Company's Social Media Policy

It would be best to craft a clear-cut company's social media policy and then share it with your employee. Without a policy, you can't make your employee share your company's details. Employers today face the most significant challenge because employees have no idea how to use social media. Most of them only explore walls and don't interact. So, the solution is to educate your employee about using social media and what's the best way.

 A training class alongside a policy would clarify what to share or what to not. Many employees don't want to face the music only because they mistakenly share something not allowed on social media. Thereby, you need to set a clear policy of what they can share and whatnot. When the policy is clear, they won't hesitate at all. 

2.Use Software and Set Social Goals

If your employees don't participate actively on social media, you can make them only by gamifying the whole social media experience. Show leaderboard and reward a top-sharing employee. This sort of social media competition would make everyone participate at some level. A reward can be a free gym membership or anything that can make your employee excited. Other rewards are gift cards, free dinner, a holiday, etc., for a top participant.

However, it would be best if you didn't give cash rewards to influence this decision. If an employee talks in public about this cash reward, this would ruin your image in the general public. You can use some employee social advocacy software to control social media progress won't be a challenge.

3.Make it an Option, Rather a Compulsion.

Don't force your employee to participate in social media platforms. They will lose their interests if you move them; no one likes to get pushed. If you do that, then you may not get the desirable results. They create plain posts with zero interest, and such posts are worth nothing in the long run. On the flip side, offering them freedom and flexibility helps them generate top quality posts about your company. 

This is the way of attracting quality leads from your employee's network.

During a social training class, don't talk that this sharing would only help the company. Explain what's in it for your employees, how they can make the most of this kind of sharing. Everyone is interested in his interest. So, explain that this active participation and social media engagement help them build their brand. Tell them their voice matters.

4.Provide Content for Sharing

Make sharing easy by offering them shareable content. Give them something interesting to share; it shouldn't always be about your company's product. Bring some variety and spices to this content sharing game, and you would see significant benefits. Avoid promotional content, sharing interesting and informative posts. No one likes to advertise on his account, but when content is beneficial for everyone, they don't mind exposing them to their social network. So, focus on quality content that your employee proudly put on their profiles.

5.Allow Freedom of Expression

Trust your employee and let them share their work experience, product experience, and other things. The main idea is to empower them, so they don't hesitate to pen a story about a new launch. If they are sharing some feedback, let them. Some employers make a mistake; they talk too much about things employees can't do. Try not to punish or judge them for a wrong post; accept that employees can express their opinion. Use this feedback to improve your product and services. 

6.Opinion Verticals

Another way to encourage employees to participate in social media is to ask them to write their opinion and article about current trends and something related to the company. When they go with this idea, they would be interested in sharing them on their social account as every piece has its name on it.  You can make a Trello group for employees who can communicate about recent social media campaigns on this platform and do something great.

7. Third-Party Content

Too much promotional content won't benefit your company, so you instead set a ratio of 50-50. According to this, your employees can share 50 percent company's content and 50 percent generic ones. Although this content might not bring instant value for the company, it would create a buzz in the long run as you will get the traffic and attention you need for brand recognition. For an employee, this sort of sharing helps him boost his career and expand his knowledge horizon. It's good to create an internal library of approved websites where employees can get some worth-sharing content to populate their accounts.

8.Feedback and Analysis

For keeping employees well-engaged on social media, you need to provide them feedback. A Social media manager should keep an eye on every account and analyze reports from employee's personal accounts to figure out what areas need improvement. A complete evaluation every month helps the manager come up with a better and improved plan.

 If something isn't working, there is a solution for it. An analysis is useless without proper feedback as it helps employees know all about their progress. If they keep putting in all the efforts and expect no reward or feedback, they won't stay engaged for a long time. So, keep patting on their back from time to time, so they know management considers every effort.

9.Frequent Training Class

Keeping employee updates about the latest happenings and progress is possible through a weekly and monthly training class. Once a social media manager submits a report, the company needs to set up some classes to educate employees on the best tips for keeping their followers engaged. When an employee knows that there would be a class where he can share his ideas and find different techniques, he knows that he has someplace to go and find a solution to his social media issues. FAQ.

10.Lead by Example

Everyone gets inspiration from a Role Model. Thereby, get help from an influencer who can join your company and keep every other employee on track. Another idea is to recognize the effort of a top-performing employee and present him as an example. People feel motivated when they have some role models and social media heroes- Give them a hero and see how they follow the same or try to do better than him.

11.Make it a part of the Job Description.

Next time you hire an employee, you should add social media management to the job description. For example, you can write that preference will be given to a social media user. This one line would attract more attention and make it straightforward for an upcoming employee that you expect him to work great on social media. 

12. Give a Helping Hand

Your employees don't know everything about social media, so offer them a helping hand. Tell them what they can do to grab more attention or better response. Talk about title length, keywords they can use, and hashtags. A social media manager can tell them what's the best time to post and how to respond to customers. You need to back them up every step as they will become experienced, and your brand will grow with them.

13. Encourage Company-Wide Connection

Treat your employees as your family, and you will see the magical improvement in your company. Ask them to stay connected with upper and lower management, make everyone accessible, build connections inside, and you will see a tenfold connection growth outside. When employees know that they can connect with top management and have an easy professional connection, they will feel at home, even at their workplace. You will also see a boost in their performance and productivity as they know that the company embraces them wholeheartedly. Offer them a comfort level and see how they shine.

 Social Media Strategy for Your Employee Engagement

Here are some parts of your social media strategy for employee engagement. I have already shared some ways that let you keep employees engaged. Now the question is how to make an effective social media strategy for your employee.

Part 1- Set some goals

Everyone needs some goals. So, ask social media managers to set some goals and ask employees nicely to hit these goals. When they know what the target is, they will try to meet it. State company's social media policy in employee manual or leaderboard so everyone can check it from time to time.

Part 2 Champion Example

An employee has already well-performed in the last month. So, present him an example and see how others would follow.

Part 3 Reward and Incentive

You can't expect them to use their social media for company unless you tell them what's in it for them. So, the main idea is to define some incentive. Share clearly what they would get after meeting a goal. 

Part 4 Social Media Advocacy

There must be an informal social media advocacy plan highlighting the benefits of social media activities for employees. Create company-wide awareness, a table-talk about social media importance isn't enough, try to touch the skyscraper aka ways to gain more followers and attention.

Part 5 Training

Not every employee could be good at social media usage; do companies need some initiative. Some classroom training helps them do better and work for mutual benefits. One hour of class is good enough. One to one training isn't possible, but group training is easy and quick.

Part 6 Perk Time

Once the timeline is over, the next thing is to check progress and reward employees on their performance level. Without the incentive, you can't keep employees on the same page as you are, so be ready to give a little and then take some excellent response from their efforts.

Part 7 Assessment

Evaluate complete strategy, figure out what you can do better, and create a new and improved method for next month. It might not be simple to manage a large company employee so that you can use some application or technology for company-wide collaboration and communication.

Bottom Line

If you own a company with less than 50 employees, setting a policy and following it won't be an issue. However, when you have a big scale organization, it's quite hard to keep employees engaged as we are talking about hundreds and thousands of employees. Remind yourself, nothing is impossible. Top brands know how important it is to bring employees on board to become successful in the long run. Making employees a part of a social media campaign might be a daunting task, but you can expect the company to grow exponentially with the right strategy and management.