Have you ever considered the reach on social media you could have if each and every one of your employees liked, shared, commented, and interacted with your company’s social media? This week I read an incredibly insightful article by Vishal Dutta for the Economic Times entitled “100x social media reach by turning your employees into brand ambassadors”. It was both incredibly eye-opening and simple.
Companies are always wondering how to up their social media engagement, and they often forget to think about the impact they could have if each of their employees, or even half of their employees, engaged with their social media accounts. Turning your employees into brand ambassadors can increase your reach, create a positive work culture, get not only your customers but also your employees engaged, and can generate a ton of exposure for your business. So, how do you do it?
Create shareable content
No one minds sharing good, relevant content but people don’t want to clog up their newsfeeds, Twitter feeds, and Instagram with advertising and crappy sales pitches. Dutta brings this point to light by reminding companies that their employees are not a sales team. People won’t want to annoy their followers with crappy tweets and Facebook posts. If you run your social media well, curate good content, write original content, and are killing it at content marketing, it should be a breeze to get your employees on board to interact with your social media accounts.
Make it mutually beneficial
People want to find good content to share on their social media feeds, and you can help them by providing them with content to share and taking the load off of them. For example, I know a sales guy who wants to be more active on Twitter and in his field, but he doesn’t know where to find relevant content to share. His company could easily feed him content to share and create a brand ambassador out of him. Educate your employees on the benefits of social media, why it’s important to be an “expert” in their field, and make it easy for them to do so. Dutta mentions that planning is key to making this work, and I completely agree. Create a social media strategy that makes sense, have quick meetings to discuss this with your employees, and even plan a newsletter or digest where your employees can see and grab the content to share. Don’t make them hunt for it or you’ll quickly lose momentum!
Reward the behaviour
Since your employees will basically be giving you free advertising for sharing your content, you should make sure to reward them for their dedication and hard work. Morale goes an extremely long way, and when people are positive and happy about working for you, they’ll genuinely want to see the company succeed and therefore, will happily share and interact with the company’s social media. Create a fun contest where every week you put the names of everyone who tweeted into a hat, and the winner gets a small prize. Or call out your employees on the company’s Twitter account and interact with them on social, feature them in your blog, and weave them into your total strategy. This is a win-win for you as a company, because not only are you rewarding your employees, you’re also letting your customers see the faces behind your company. Making your employees brand ambassadors on social media is an absolutely brilliant idea and one that can give your company (and your company’s culture) lasting benefits and rewards. Let me know what you think in the comments, or share your own ideas!
