Susan Shelby, FSMPS, CPSM, President and CEO, Rhino PR
Amplify Your Social Media Messages by Enlisting Your Employees
By now, social media is no doubt an important aspect of your firm’s overall marketing plan. Whether posting to a LinkedIn company page, tweeting firm milestones, or uploading blog posts, are you really using these tools to their full advantage? There is a tremendous opportunity to exponentially increase the reach of all of your social media posts by leveraging your firm’s greatest asset: its employees.
Whatever your goal — be it driving traffic to your website, providing a call to action, increasing your number of followers, or simply raising awareness of your firm — you want your content to be disseminated as widely as possible across your target market. Tapping your employees’ network of followers, friends and connections on social media translates into a network that is just too large to ignore. While it’s true that not all of these contacts are potential clients, they are typically like-minded individuals and many may be in the same or related fields. And, by asking your employees to help spread the word to boost the reach of your company’s social media platforms, your message is often perceived as coming from a more trusted source.
Before you begin, here are some helpful tips for professional services firms to make the most out of every post:
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Maintain Brand Consistency
While some companies allow employees free rein on corporate social media accounts, most professional services firms need to keep control over messaging. It is important that one person, or at least one department, be responsible for posting content to corporate platforms in order to maintain brand consistency and voice.
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Engage Everyone
To build buy-in for your efforts, everyone should feel a part of the process. Ask staff to provide ideas on what to post and have a place where people can share them, even if it’s a simple Dropbox or Google Docs repository. Be sure to draw on these suggestions and give credit where it’s due.
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Make it Easy
Some people will share and repost on their own, but it may not come as easily to others. Make it simple for everyone to share your most important content by providing the URL and some suggested text, together with a quick step by step on how to post on different platforms.
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Make it Fun
Instead of adding this to a never-ending to-do list, make it something people are happy to do. Encourage participation by sharing positive results and feedback with everyone, and consider posting weekly analytics in a prominent place. Share who had the most likes or re-tweets for a given post. While participation isn’t mandatory, a little friendly competition can help draw people into your marketing effort.
- Provide training
Social media may be second nature for some, but not everyone at the firm. Provide quick tutorials for each platform so employees know how to use these tools to their fullest potential. Educate them on what to post and how to include links that drive traffic back to your firm’s website. For example, do they know they can add articles and blogs to their own LinkedIn profile? As a first step, ask them to follow the firm’s social media accounts so they can see what’s available to share and re-post.
When done effectively, enlisting employees to help cast your social media net as widely as possible can be a powerful addition to any social media strategy.
