Your Employees = Your Best Brand Advocates. Are You Using Them Wisely? | Social Joey

As you have probably realized by now, social media is a very important—and necessary—part of your business. When you use social media, you want to make sure you are not only publishing content consistently, but also that the content is consistent with your brand!

After all, the point is to drive people to your business. And if your social media strategy doesn’t align with your brand, how are you going to get the leads you want to grow your business?

Therefore, it is time to start building your social media village in order to create the best content possible to reach your target audience. Who should be in your village? Why not start with your employees?

What better way to strengthen your brand than through a group of people who demonstrate your company’s values day in and day out? By working together, you and your employees can work to put together the perfect social media strategy to grow your business.

Unlock your employees’ potential with these tips:

Training Is Key

As with anything, you want to make sure you are providing the necessary training to improve your employees’ ability to be a good marketer.

While your employees might already dabble in social media by tweeting, posting on Facebook and uploading photos on Instagram, it doesn’t mean they don’t need further education on how to use social media as a marketing tool.

Therefore, when making your social media budget, be sure you also consider training in order to help encourage employee engagement as part of your social media marketing efforts.

Say Yes! to Social Media Use at Work

OK, before you start to freak out, this doesn’t mean you are allowing your employees to play on social media all day.

But if you are blocking your employees’ ability to use social media while online at work, you are basically cutting off their ability to reach the outside world—and that includes your target audience.

How are your employees supposed to share the word about your business and reach your potential customers when they have no access? Crazy, right?

One of the greatest tools marketers have had over the decades is word of mouth. That’s no different in today’s online world; people are simply sharing word of mouth in a digital format.

Your employees should ideally be your biggest brand advocates, so having them sharing their experience and perspective, along with your marketing campaigns online, can only help boost your sales.

So, start allowing your employees to use social media in the workplace in order to build deeper connections with your customers so that they can then turn around and let you know what your target audience is looking for. If you know what your customers want, then you can determine solutions that help provide that to them—and hence, grow your business!

Don’t Forget About the Social Media Policy

Just because you make the move to allow employees access to social media platforms at work doesn’t mean they should have completely free rein. Some guidelines are necessary, which is where a social media policy comes into play.

While you want to encourage your employees to communicate and build relationships using social media, your company also has a reputation it needs to uphold. Therefore, you need to make sure that even when your employees are on social media, they are still representing the values and standards of your company.

Create a social media policy so that not only is your company protected, but your employees are protected, too!

A good social media policy includes:

• The sites employees are allowed to access at work
• Which employees are allowed to speak on social media about/for your company
• The security requirements needed to keep your business and employees safe
• The difference between personal and business use of social media
• What behavior is prohibited

Find Your Brand Advocates

While some employees will just know the basics of social media, take it a step further by finding employees who really know how to engage with your target audience on social media.

You’re looking for two things here—you want employees who are social media-savvy and you want employees who advocate well for your brand and the services and products you offer.

When you find those employees who know how to attract and continue to capture the attention of your target audience, you want to make sure you recognize them for their efforts and show gratitude for the contribution they make for your company’s bottom line.

Remember, employees who are appreciated will always do more than expected. The same is true when you are using them to boost your company’s social media efforts.

Make It Easy for Employees to Create & Share Social Posts

If a task is difficult to perform, it is usually going to be one of the last tasks completed by your employees. In addition, because they will dread doing it, they will not put as much time and effort into the task.

Therefore, in order to really get employees engaged online, you need to make the process easy for them to share your branded content. Whether you use a Dropbox, shared Google Docs or another online tool for project management, you want to ensure it is something that is super easy to use by all!

You may want to encourage your employees to “share” or “retweet” your business page posts—or you can go a step further by creating unique content that shares your branded messaging specifically for your employees to share.

Are you ready to take the social media world by storm? Allow our team at Social Joey to take the bull by the horns and pave the way for a whole new world when it comes to your business and its social media strategy!