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We all understand the importance of a strong social media presence for the growth and success of your small to medium-sized business (SMB). One often overlooked strategy for maximizing social media impact is leveraging your internal team to share, like, and engage with your company’s content. In this guide, we’ll explore simple methods to create a system that encourages your team to participate, the benefits of doing so, and how to foster a culture where team members are eager to contribute.
By encouraging your internal team to actively share and engage with your company’s social media posts, your business can enjoy several benefits:
Social media engagement is critical for reaching new customers. According to a 2021 HubSpot report, 74% of consumers use social media to make purchase decisions.
Creating your team and employees into advocates for your message also works similarly to some of the strategies in User Generated Content. When they post or share your content, it reaches their entire audience, and often friends of their friends and even further. This opens up your awareness to an entire sphere of influence that you would not be able to achieve organically when limited to only your own company profiles.
Employee-shared content is perceived as more authentic, resulting in higher engagement rates compared to content shared by companies themselves.
A strong social media presence contributes to a positive brand image, ultimately boosting customer trust and loyalty.
Before you get started, you’ll benefit from strategizing to determine your company goals for encouraging social engagement by your employees in the first place.
It’s possible that you will have one overarching goal in general; and one specific goal for a campaign or any individual piece of content. When you’re considering individual campaigns or individual pieces of content, you should only choose the ONE most important goal.
Specify whether you want the team to like, comment, or share posts, and how frequently you expect them to participate.
Which activity you need for each individual piece of content may vary based upon your campaign goals. What you’re doing here is similar to a Call to Action – tell them how to do (click on this link to visit the post about the convention) and the WHAT to do (comment about your experience at the convention)
This clarity makes it easier for team members to meet expectations and contribute to your company’s social media success.
Drawing from personal experience, I can attest to the power of providing your team with branded or co-branded content to share on their social media profiles. In my last corporate job, I was responsible for creating and providing social media content for a team of over 1,100 employees across 20 remote offices. We understood the value of equipping our team with company-approved content that could be easily shared to ensure proper branding and messaging.
We made this content available on an intranet site, and for those who opted into the program, we also had the ability to directly share content to their social media pages. At times, during company meetings, we would share a link to a specific piece of content, such as a Facebook post, and provide a single instruction for the team to follow – like commenting or sharing the post.
The two most crucial lessons (which have borne out in numerous similar internal content plans since):
To encourage team members to engage with and share company content, it’s essential to make the process as simple as possible. By providing readily available, pre-approved content on an easily accessible platform, you minimize the effort required for participation.
What you don’t want to do is have some complicated and convoluted process they need to go through to join in. “Download this video and upload it to TikTok as a reaction video with our video in the background, and you’ll need to use some type of special video splicing software to do this” … no one has time for that.
Even with a streamlined process, it’s vital to create an environment where team members want to engage with and share company content. Cultivating a sense of camaraderie and shared goals can inspire employees to actively contribute to your company’s social media efforts.
To foster a culture where your team is eager to participate in your company’s social media efforts, consider the following tips:
Lead by example: Demonstrate your own commitment to social media engagement by actively sharing, liking, and commenting on company posts. This sets a positive precedent for the rest of your team to follow.
Provide training: Offer training sessions or workshops to help your team understand the nuances of different social media platforms and best practices for engagement. This ensures they are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to contribute effectively. These should showcase the simplicity of what you’re requesting them to do.
Recognize and appreciate efforts: Acknowledge your team’s participation and celebrate their achievements. Regularly express gratitude for their contributions and highlight standout performers in team meetings or through internal communications.
Encourage collaboration: Create opportunities for your team members to contribute ideas and content for your social media channels. This fosters a sense of ownership and investment in the success of your company’s online presence.
Don’t force participation: Some team members will have their own reasons why they do not want to participate. Perhaps they keep their social media profile for friends and family only and never have work or career-related information. Maybe they have a whole separate personal persona that is completely different from their work persona and you don’t even WANT them to share … lol. It should be voluntary, encouraged, filled with fun, but optional.
To motivate your team, it’s crucial to communicate the benefits of their engagement with your company’s social media content. Some potential benefits include:
Increased Company Visibility: The more your team engages with your content, the greater your online exposure. This can lead to new customers and ultimately boost your bottom line, which provides additional revenue available for things like raises and bonuses (but never promise this, or even mention it, unless you’re committed to following through).
Personal Branding: When employees share company content, they can simultaneously build their professional online presence.
Stronger Team Spirit: Sharing and engaging with company posts can create a sense of camaraderie and promote a feeling of being part of a collective effort.
Increased Sales: For those team members directly engaged in sales, especially when commission-based, there’s proof that the right activity on social media can produce results. 78% of salespeople engaged in social selling are outselling their peers who are not. (LinkedIn, 2020) Having access to readily available and professionally created content can make it easier.
Different departments – and even different team members – will have different motivators that speak to them most to get them engaged. Here it’s important to understand those motivating factors, and make sure you’re relaying the right message to the right people. Obviously, team members who aren’t salespeople won’t care at all about outperforming other salespeople.
Simple Methods to Boost Team Engagement
Not required for this strategy to work, but gamifying the process can introduce an extra layer of fun.
Introduce friendly competitions among team members with rewards for those who share, like, or comment on the most posts (based upon your goals). This can create a fun atmosphere, motivate higher participation, and foster team bonding.
For example, hold a monthly contest with prizes or recognition for the most active participants.
One easy way to track participation (because it needs to be easy for your content/marketing team as well) is to request they use a specific hashtag when sharing, so that you can follow that hashtag. When asking them to comment or like, most of the platforms are set up where you can track that pretty easily.
As part of making it easy, you need to create ONE channel where the team can always find the content and what you want them to do with the content.
Create a dedicated communication channel within your internal messaging platform (like Slack or Microsoft Teams) specifically for sharing company social media content. This makes it easy for your team to access and engage with your posts in a centralized location. For businesses without such platforms, a dedicated email thread can serve the same purpose.
There are numerous tools available to streamline the social sharing process. Here are a few popular options and their pros and cons:
Hootsuite: This platform allows you to schedule posts, monitor engagement, and provide shareable links for your team. However, some features are limited in the free version.
Buffer: Another scheduling tool that offers analytics and easy sharing options, but its free version comes with limited functionalities.
Most platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer, for the most functionality each team member would need to have their own account as part of your enterprise account. That quickly adds up.
What we’ve found works best for all of the companies where we’ve helped them set up these systems are using platforms they already have the team using, or when that won’t function as well as desired, using free platforms such as:
Airtable: some smaller companies like the convenience of Airtable to make content available to a team. We have had great success setting this system up for many companies that weren’t using a scheduling tool that their whole team had access to.
Email: For businesses without access to advanced tools, a simple email thread can still effectively encourage team members to share and engage with your company’s social media content. Simply provide the URL of the post, and let them know what action to take.
Consider the story of a fast-growing SMB that leveraged its internal team to boost social media engagement. Here’s a few things they did well:
The company created a dedicated Slack channel for sharing social media content with the team and provided team members with shareable links for easy access.
They also initiated monthly contests with fun rewards for the most active participants, fostering healthy competition and camaraderie. Some of those were as simple as a $5 Starbucks gift card sent via email.
As a result, the company saw a significant increase in social media reach, engagement, and ultimately, customer acquisition. Creating social media advocates out of their team was not the ONLY strategy we targeted at the time, so it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how much impact it had alone, but they saw noteworthy increases in engagement on each platform and overall traffic to their website as soon as we added these strategies.
By employing these strategies with your employees (see what I did there?), you can unlock the power of your team to bolster your SMB’s social media presence. Through clear communication, goal-setting, the right tools, and fostering a culture of enthusiastic participation, you can transform the way your business leverages a combination of your team plus social media to drive growth and success.
Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.
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