Insights & Ideas

Leverage Your Employees’ Use of Social Media to Achieve Your Business Goals

What if you had a great way to harness the passion, knowledge, and positive emotional ties your employees have with your brand’s products or services? How about being able to measurably drive your sales and marketing by giving your employees a voice and a platform to actively share their thoughts with customers.

What if, at the same time, you could improve peer-to-peer recruitment for new employees? And for good measure how about being able to boost your employees’ productivity and satisfaction while reducing turnover?

Wouldn’t that be nifty? These aren’t just ideas from brains on sticks. This stuff matters and there are real tie-ins between improving employee engagement and boosting your bottom line.

No, this isn’t some BS sales pitch.

Companies like GE, IBM, Southwest Airlines, and even the NYC Police Department are engaging their employees in their Social Business efforts to support their broader strategic business/operational goals. And of course, many smaller organizations have been very effective in getting their employees engaged with great results.

So how is it some are succeeding while other companies that have been at it for a while aren’t making any headway? The answer doesn’t lie in a single technology. It’s not found in the ultimate corporate Social Media strategy. And the secret isn’t having a team of expert-trained Ninja content writers (though that might be pretty cool).

Quite simply, it’s about taking a practical, holistic approach and starting with a solid employee engagement strategy. My aim here is to break down the steps you can take to create an engagement strategy that actually encourages your employees to use their own social networks while helping you achieve your business’ goals.

Developing your employee social media engagement strategy is pretty straightforward.

Start with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish by engaging your employees in your company’s social business platforms. What opportunities are you taking advantage of? What problems are you solving through your employees’ use of their social media channels? Are you looking to build awareness for your brand where you have operations or underperforming sales?

Perhaps you need to grow your audience to attract new customers or talent? Seeking to build brand loyalty and trust? What about saving money while recruiting top talent? Remember social media is not a strategy. It’s a tactic. Be sure to attach measurable metrics to what you’re seeking to achieve.

Get an executive sponsor.

While you don’t necessarily need to have your engagement strategy nailed down before you seek an executive sponsor, it can only help. Many employee social media engagement efforts fail to take off or flat out fail because they lacked executive buy-in. Make it matter to your executives.

Many in the C-suite probably aren’t on Twitter or Facebook. They may be on LinkedIn, but seldom use the business-networking platform. And while they may occasionally watch the funny video on YouTube their friend sent them in an email, they may not make the leap to how this robust video sharing platform could save your business hundreds of thousands of dollars in training or other operational costs.

It’s your job to help them understand how to use social media as a business tool. Demonstrate what the potential business value is. Once you’ve got your sponsor, you gain credibility and (hopefully) funding for your efforts.

Share your strategy with your employees.

Proactively tell them that your plan is and what you’re looking to accomplish with their help. Provide them with clear examples of what they can do to engage if they’re already using social media. Be sure to also let them know what isn’t helpful and what actually can hurt the company on social media.

While you can offer to help employees not already using social media “get on the train,” your time is better-spent identifying key employees that already use social media. From there, you’ll also want to determine who among them you can groom to be employee social brand ambassadors.

Getting them engaged in your efforts will help build trust and authenticity with external audiences, especially as they begin sharing employee-driven content. This leads us to the next two steps.

Create a clear, easy-to-understand Social Media policy and provide training.

Empower your employees. Don’t create barriers to generating engagement. Provide your employees with training on the policy so they understand the dos and don’ts. Ensure they understand best practices for the platforms they’re using, e.g., when to post, how often, use of hashtags, image tagging, etc. Also, make sure you’ve got social brand ambassadors on each of the social platforms you’re targeting.

Set up a content factory. This includes developing a social business roadmap with audiences you’re seeking to reach, audience interests, key messages, and target platforms. Create a social media content calendar and determine posting frequency and times by platform so you can maximize the number of people you reach with your content.

Create content in advance along with hashtags, images, news, trivia, job opportunities, and infographics that you can share with your social organization’s “social team.” When your social brand ambassadors are ready, encourage them to create their own content. This requires trust and letting go a bit. Never fear, this leads us into my next recommendation

Set up your social listening platform.

Ensure you are able to monitor what your colleagues, friends, and followers are sharing and saying about your company. Be transparent with your employees about the fact you’re monitoring and why.

I use HootSuite as well as other resources to monitor social platforms, news, blogs, search terms, tags, and other filters. This helps me see what’s being said about clients and determine whether to respond, engage, escalate to the legal department, or activate the community of social brand ambassadors to post or share content.

Social listening also allows you to find great examples of employee social posts and recognize them for their efforts. Also, monitoring will head off issues with what employees are sharing about your business, colleagues, or customers.

While there’s always a risk of someone posting something you’d rather not see from an employee, in my experience, it is extremely uncommon for that to happen if the above steps are taken.

Build analytics into your social media engagement strategy.

These days everything that goes on in the social sphere generates data giving you the opportunity to capture, analyze, and report on outcomes, trends, and more.

Measuring your metrics is straightforward, too, given that all the major platforms have analytics built into them: Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, and YouTube Analytics, etc. HootSuite also has analytics tools for all of the above social platforms. What’s nice about HootSuite is these analytics tools are all integrated into one platform so you don’t have to log into multiple accounts to get your reports.

A final word of advice.

Have a vision for what success looks like. Now you have new tools to help you achieve your marketing communication goals. Unlike newsletters, email, snail mail, and quarterly town hall or company meetings, you have powerful tools you can use to transform your business communication.

But remember, just because you ask your employees to follow your brand on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter doesn’t mean they will. In my experience, it’s actually a surprisingly small number so that’s why it takes more than a memo to make this work. To be successful, it takes a methodical, well-planned strategy; execution, ongoing monitoring and training — as well as ensuring new hires understand their role and the policy.

(Example blog post based on a post I previously wrote for 6kites.com)