Secrets to Unleash
Your Employees to Power
Your Social Marketing
By
Eric Schiffer
My ex-girlfriend hated the Facebook page for her company. She said it was boring, not relevant to customers, and didn’t educate or entertain them, and certainly didn’t cause them to act to buy. Consider that if your own employees don’t even like your company’s Facebook page, why should anyone? At the root of social media is engagement, the opportunity to get your brand into the minds of people. It is an opportunity to develop quality leads. The average social media user has ninety people in their network. If you persuade the average social media user to link to your content, ninety trusted impressions could be headed your way.
Identifying and curating good content is the key to persuading the average social media user to look at or link to your company. As the CEO of DigitalMarketing.com, I’m frequently asked why this Twitter handle isn’t getting enough follows, or why their Facebook post wasn’t shared enough. The answer in part is failing to properly capitalize on your number one resource, your employees, for social media marketing purposes. It can be a difference-maker to your bottom line.
The potential of social media to drive revenue for companies remains largely untapped. Most will stick a 23-year-old fresh out of college in the entry-level position of “social media” without considering that this person is now the voice connecting your customers to your business. It’s dangerous to give someone much power, so green, when one tweet can lead to a backlash, boycott, or worse. Spending all day on Instagram does not qualify someone as a social media expert.
To start, here are a few tips: Crowdsource your social content by asking your employees to submit social media update ideas and picking the best ones to post on your social media pages. Turn it into an office wide contest. You will diversify your content streams and increase the amount of activity that takes place on your social networks.
Ensure that your employees’ social profiles, professional and personal, feature your company’s website in the “Occupation” section. Not only will this increase the social exposure of your brand across each social network, but this doubles as an SEO technique to increase the overall ranking of your website. Promote your company on as many social profiles as possible.
Run social promotions for your employees. Offer an incentive for your employees to like or follow your company’s social media profiles. Hold contests where a prize goes to the employee who gets the most likes, shares, or retweets from their network of a company page or press release. Ask your employees to comment on posts in order to ratify them. This is a grassroots way to increase your brand’s social media presence.
Have your employees create short viral marketing videos and share them privately on social media. The best or most popular videos could receive a bonus or a reward and be released to the public.
Advertise job listings through your employees’ social media networks. You can attract talented individuals who already maintain good personal relationships with employees that you know and trust. Additionally, your brand and pages get extra, valuable social media exposure.
Social media is the 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, traditionally the most cost-effective form of marketing. Having a base of employees who love talking about your brand is the best way to get their friends (and friends of friends) enthusiastic about your brand. But the key is featuring content that generates enthusiasm. Entrusting this job to one person’s voice or failing to execute on the above steps and others is a decidedly anti-social form of social media marketing, and can stop you from realizing the real social revenue potential for your brand.
Eric Schiffer is a world-leading expert in digital marketing as CEO of Digitalmarketing.com, providing his keen insights to Fortune 500 CEOs, foreign leaders, Forbes 400 billionaires and celebrities. He is the chairman of ReputationManagementConsultants.com.
