Social media can be an incredibly powerful tool for driving brand awareness, and having employees engage and share can extend your reach. However, convincing employees to engage can be difficult.
So what can you do to encourage greater engagement on social media? Here are some of our best tips for building a process encouraging employees to participate.
Why brand awareness should be a priority
Social media should be part of your strategy for building brand awareness simply because of the sheer amount of exposure it can bring. Social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, are some of the most popular platforms for marketing and advertising. They allow businesses to reach a wide variety of clients and prospects from all walks of life.
Additionally, social media engagement allows firms to demonstrate their expertise in a particular field. By establishing themselves as thought leaders, firms can build trust and authority with potential clients.
Tips for motivating employees to engage on social media
Here are some of our best ideas for creating a process that encourages your team members to engage on social media.
Connect employees to the brand
Providing social media graphics and copy for employees is a great way to encourage them to share on social media because it makes it easy.
At Boomer Consulting, we create graphics and copy for events, holidays, and other potential social media content and save them in our document management system. This makes them easily accessible to team members who want to share on their social media profiles.
Including graphics--not just text--in social media posts is essential because it's more likely to catch people's eye as they're scrolling, so posts with graphics get more engagement. Using short videos can boost engagement as well.
If you make graphics for employees, ensure they include your firm's logo to help build brand awareness. Also, provide relevant hashtags to extend their reach and increase engagement.
Provide ongoing support
Remind employees in staff meetings, newsletters, your intranet or other communication channels of upcoming social media posting opportunities and encourage them to share.
Having that constant reminder can help people keep building brand awareness top of mind. You might even encourage them to make it part of their daily routine--one of the first things they do when they sit down at their desk in the morning, for example. Sharing takes only a minute or two, but it can go a long way toward establishing them as thought leaders and giving potential clients an extra layer of trust in your firm.
If some employees don't use social media platforms personally, they might not feel proficient in using them. In that case, consider providing short training sessions to help them become more proficient in the social media platforms you want them to use.
Offer incentives
Having employees engage with the firm's social media accounts as well as sharing from their own can also extend the reach of your posts and open new doors to potential business opportunities.
One way to motivate employees to engage with the firm's social media content is to offer incentives. For example, you might consider giving a small prize or gift card to the employee who shares and comments the most each month or enter all employees who engage into a drawing for an extra day of PTO.
Consider sharing from partner's profiles
Chances are, unless the partners in your firm are already active on social media, they probably don't have a lot of capacity to start liking and sharing. If that's a challenge, consider taking over those responsibilities for them.
Many social media management platforms allow you to connect multiple profiles, so you can link their accounts and share their thought leadership and other content on their profiles.
Of course, they should also have free reign to post and engage independently, but handling some of the heavy lifting for them can save time and ensure their social media profiles aren't stale.
Social media can be an invaluable asset to firms when it comes to brand awareness and growth. Building a process that encourages employees to post firm-branded content on their social media profiles can be one of the best approaches to use when aiming for greater reach and recognition.
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As a Marketing Coordinator for Boomer Consulting, Inc., Emilie is excited to complement her social media content creation skills and learn more about other aspects of marketing. Her primary focus is managing the company’s website, collaborating with the sales team on marketing campaigns, and assisting with webinars, video content and design work to represent the company’s brand and services.
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