Social Marketing

How to Include Your Employees In Your Social Media Strategy

As people (especially younger generations, like millennials) become increasingly desensitized to advertising, you must
start thinking of new, innovative ways to get your brand’s message received.  Studies show that with the rise of social media,consumers are relying less on ads and more on their peers’ opinions and experiences when making decisions, especially with purchases.  One easy way to capitalize on this trend is by using your own employees to share your brand messages. 

 Your employees are trusted sources to their peers, not a company that many users will see as distrustful or just looking for a sale.  People will be more willing to read your message if they don’t feel like they are being sold to, but rather informed by a trusted source.  Your employees’ voices are authentic and trustworthy to their peers and friends, creating a message that they want to share will increase your potential customer reach exponentially. “Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees versus the same messages shared via official brand social channels. Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by employees versus brand.

How To Get Started

After hearing these staggering statistics, you’ve realized just how important involving your employees in your social media plan is; let us give you some tips on getting started.

  1. Create An Incentivized Program

    • It doesn’t have to be extensive or complicated, but create a program that rewards employees for sharing things about the company. This could be something as simple as asking employees to send in pictures of team events (team breakfasts, parties, or trade shows) that your marketing team can share on the company’s official pages for public spotlight.  Another great option is to offer monthly rewards to the employees who share the most or interact the most with the company’s social efforts.
  2. Provide A Tool For Centralized Communication

    • This could be a Facebook private group or email group, or a group messaging tool like Slack or Yammer to share updates with your employees. These tools are also great for making sure everyone is on the same page and are representing the brand appropriately.  By sharing frequent updates to these channels, your employees will feel more involved and invested in the company and can pick-and-choose which topics are important enough to them to share, and potentially important to their networks of friends.
  3. Spotlight Employees

    • This one goes hand-in-hand with an incentivized program. By publicly applauding employees via social media, you are encouraging others to reach for the goal of recognition as well.  This is also a great way to build morale and team unity throughout your company, no matter how large or small.  Another easy way to increase engagement is to tag that employee in the post so that you can gain exposure to their audience as well.

Now that you understand why your employees are so important to your strategy and you know some starter tips, get together with your team and figure out the best ways you can start implementing them into your marketing plan today.

Kick Starter Step: The first step to including your employees in your company’s social strategy is to make sure your brand and culture are clearly portrayed so both the company’s official platforms and those of your employees are sharing a cohesive message.

To make the most of your social media strategy, download our free Ultimate Social Media Checklist to help improve your current strategy and build a stronger social presence.

                 

Stay Social!

Kelsey

Kelsey McKee is a Social Media Coordinator for Stream Companies.