As marketers, we know that social media and brand visibility go hand-in-hand. 70% of brand marketers list building brand awareness as their top goal for social media. And while a strong branded social media presence is critical to supporting this goal, it’s not the only brand-building tool in the tool chest. Your employees’ personal social media accounts can also help amplify and increase brand visibility. In this blog post, we will discuss nine ways to improve your brand’s visibility through employee engagement.
Nine Tips: Leveraging Employee Engagement to Increase Brand Visibility
Develop a Culture of Social Sharing
The first step to encouraging your employees to share your brand’s content on their social media channels is to create a culture of social sharing. However, more than simply asking your employees to do so may be required.
You need to lead by doing, which means from the top down, you need to show your employees that leadership and senior executives are also sharing content.
Implement an Employee Advocacy Program
Some employees will share your social content simply because they know it’s expected from them (given the culture of social sharing), but others may need a bit more incentive to share.
One way to incentivize your employees to share your brand’s content is to offer rewards for those who actively participate in sharing. This can be as simple as recognizing top contributors in a company newsletter or offering gift cards to those who share the most content.
To fulfill these rewards, we’d recommend leveraging a technology built to support employee advocacy programs. Say, a little software named SocialToaster.
When your employees share content through SocialToaster, the system will automatically tally the performance of each post – awarding points and ranking employees so that you can easily pass along rewards.
Build A Central Hub To House Your Content
It’s also essential to ensure your employees have easy access to your brand’s content. This can be achieved by creating a centralized hub for your brand’s social media content, including images, videos, and articles.
Providing your employees with pre-written captions and hashtags can also make it easier for them to share your content. These elements should be created for all content pieces, including blog posts, photos, and other posts that employees may find interesting or relevant.
Host Employee Events
Not only can employee events help to foster collaboration and team-building, but they can also be excellent sources for generating content that employees want to share on their social platforms.
Host events for your employees (team-building exercises or charity events), and take plenty of pictures during the event. Then place those pictures in an album so that your employees can easily find themselves in the pictures. Employees are likelier to share content that directly references them or their work.
Share Employee Stories
In the same vein, collecting and sharing employee stories should also be central to your brand visibility efforts. Sharing employee stories is an excellent way to humanize your brand and connect with your audience on a deeper level.
These stories can highlight your employees’ unique experiences and perspectives, making them relatable to your customers and giving them a platform to shine. Employee story content can include:
- Highlighting Employee Achievements,
- Sharing Milestones
- Day-to-Day Activities
Sharing these stories on your social media channels, website, or company newsletter can help to build trust and foster a more personal connection with your audience.
Offer Content that Educates Employees
An employee advocacy effort is only as strong as the content being shared. By educating your employees about your industry, you can equip them with the knowledge they need to decide what content to share on their social media channels. This can help ensure that the content they share is relevant and engaging to their followers, which can increase your brand’s visibility.
To create effective educational content, start by understanding your employees’ interests and pain points. Consider conducting surveys or focus groups to gather insights into what topics your employees are most interested in learning about. You can also leverage internal experts or guest speakers to provide unique perspectives and insights on your industry.
Share Company News
Sharing company news provides a double-whammy of a social sharing impact. First, it can educate your prospective customers about your company, new products, partnerships, etc. Second, it can help to ensure your employees are ALSO aware of the news.
Company news content can include updates on new products or services, company milestones, or notable achievements. By sharing these updates, employees will feel more connected to the brand and will be more likely to be advocates.
Involve Employees in The Creation of Your Social Sharing Strategy
The more you involve your employees in creating your employee advocacy efforts, the more likely they are to adopt and support the plan.
We recommend launching an initial pilot program with a few trusted team members. From here, you can solicit feedback back to improve the performance of your efforts BEFORE you roll the program out to the entire team.
Measure Engagement and Visibility – Then Improve
Use tools to measure employee engagement, such as surveys and performance reports. This helps you identify areas of weakness and create opportunities to improve performance.
SocialToaster has robust reporting functionality to help brands automatically tally the return on their visibility-building efforts.
An effective employee engagement effort can supercharge your social-sharing efforts – improving brand visibility and amplifying your content. By following these best practices to increase your brand’s visibility with employee engagement, you can create a culture of advocacy and take your brand to the next level.
Want to learn more about how you can use SocialToaster to build and launch a successful employee advocacy effort? Schedule a demo today.
