How Do I Get My Employee to Engage with Our Social Media Accounts?

Have you ever posted on your company's social media accounts, asked your team to please share and comment on it, only to have it remain unengaged with? In the grand scheme of things, your business could be missing out on a whole different audience when your employees don’t interact with your social media. It’s important that your employees engage with your company's social media accounts consistently. Why? Simply because it increases the number of views, shares, comments, and the overall reach of your posts. 

Let’s dive into the importance of employee interaction with your company's social media accounts and some simple things you can do to help get them involved. 

The Importance of Employee Social Media Interaction

Having a social media presence as a company has been proven to create success if done consistently and well. Social media can be one of the most effective channels to utilize when reaching new audiences with your brand story, values, special offers, and culture in general. In a survey done by Omobono, 79% of the 115 senior-level B2B marketers claimed that social media is effective in deepening customer relationships and building thought leadership.

But what about the personal connections of the employees? When your employees are actively engaged with your company’s social media, it will amplify your content and allow you to reach new audiences. This is because when an employee shares, likes, or comments on your social media posts, it boosts the possibility of others within their network seeing it. To put things into perspective check out these stats:

• Your employees have an average of 1,090 social connections (and growing)
• Employees have 5x more reach than corporate accounts
• Social followers of your employees are 7x more likely to convert

People are also more likely to consume media from sources that they trust. Edelman Trust Barometer shows that people have much higher trust in regular employees (54%) than in a company’s CEO (47%). Their trust in a company’s technical experts is even higher (68%). 

Now that we understand the importance of employee interactions on social media, let’s discuss some ways to implement this.

How to Get Your Team Involved

It might be a little bit slow at the beginning, but the work of getting your employees to engage with content will pay off. There are many ways to successfully do this, but here are some of the top things you can do to get started:

1. Conduct an Employee Social Media Audit — One of the most important social media networks for business is LinkedIn. There are millions of users as well as corporations. For businesses, it is crucial to use LinkedIn in your social media strategy. This is because it is the top social media channel utilized by employers and employees. At 1 Bold Step, we conduct social media audits for clients by researching their employee’s LinkedIn profiles, evaluating their engagement on LinkedIn, determining if their profile was up to date, if they followed the company, and if they were sharing content. Doing this helped to refresh the employees’ LinkedIn page and allowed them to see where they could improve and how they could be a greater part of the company’s social media strategy.
2. Post a Variety of Quality Content — It’s not necessary for employees to like/share/comment on every piece of content that your business creates. However, having plenty of content to choose from allows your employees to pick and choose what they’d like to interact with. It can be encouraging when there is content relatable to their specific position or passions within the company.
3. Stress the Importance of Everyone Sharing — There is a common misconception that sales and marketing employees are the only ones that create value out of sharing content. If not everyone is on the same page, some will have no idea the impact they could bring to the organization by connecting with current customers and sharing their companies and industry content. The possibilities are endless to reach new audiences and spread the word even further.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Get Personal — One thing that I’ve noticed is that the posts that tend to do the best are about the employees themselves! Highlight promotions, new hires, events, and even personal experiences. This allows your employees to feel like they are a part of the company on a deeper level and can share their wins with their audience.
5. Notify your Employees — There are many different ways to make your team aware of your social media activity. You could do this through Slack any time there is an important campaign launch, job post, or company news article that goes out. You can also do this directly through automation available through LinkedIn. Interested in learning how to do this? Check out this article. 

Now that you have the tools to get your employees to share your content, check out this checklist of ways that your employees can utilize to stay connected with your brand. 

Checklist of Ways to Engage

• Re-posting company blogs
• Re-sharing company social media posts
• Liking posts
• Commenting on posts
• Sharing industry news 
• Sharing posts from other employees 
• Adding content to social media stories 
• Share with family and friends 
• Keep social media pages up-to-date and connected with the company
  
  

Wrap Up

There are no downsides to increasing social media engagement amongst your employees. It allows them to feel pride in their work, show their expertise, and engage with their connections on a whole new level. Not only that, but it provides a new audience for your company and will increase your metrics. Well, what are you waiting for? Go share that post!