When our clients ask us how to increase their social media reach and engagement, we counsel them to look first at whether and how much their own employees share and like their corporate or thought leaders’ posts. The Twitter and LinkedIn algorithms that determine what is shown on a user’s feed favor posts that quickly attract high levels of engagement. That means the more and the quicker your team members engage with your post, the more the algorithms will push the post out to your broader audience.
By taking a more active role, your employees can play a critical first step to increasing your engagement rates on social media. In fact, employees have networks that are an average of ten times larger than that of their company’s follower base and content shared by employees generally receives twice the level of engagement, according to research by LinkedIn. If you are wondering how to leverage your employees’ connections to boost your social media results, below are some strategies to consider.
Use built-in notification systems
LinkedIn has a “notify employees” option that can be used once every 24 hours to send all employees a notification that you’ve posted something new. When one of our clients started to use the “notify employees” button on LinkedIn, their interactions jumped up by 129% over the course of one quarter, compared to previous quarters where the growth in engagement had been only around 60%. If you’re planning to share more than one LinkedIn in on a given day, take a moment to decide which one warrants using the notification.
Notify employees of posts through email
You also might consider sending an email or newsletter to your team that includes links to recent social media posts and encourages them to engage with the posts by liking, commenting or sharing. This tactic can be especially useful when your company is announcing significant news or when you want to increase the reach of important whitepapers or media appearances.
Take advantage of instant messaging
If your team uses a workplace communication or collaboration tool like Slack, you could create a channel or group chat for notifying your team about recent social posts that you want to amplify. This makes it easy and convenient for employees to find recent posts across various platforms that they might want to engage with.
Regardless of which tool you use to notify employees of recent posts, be careful of how often you use it. If you overload or spam your colleagues with too-frequent notifications, you run the risk that they will start to ignore your appeals for engagement.
Make it fast and easy
Consider providing suggested captions that your employees can use when sharing a post with their personal networks. By including pre-approved language in the emails, newsletters or messages that you use to notify your employees about recent posts, you make it even faster and easier for your team to comply with your request to share or post.
If your company doesn’t already have an employee advocacy platform, you could employ an app or software such as Hootsuite Amplify or Bambu by Sprout Social to make it simple for your team to engage with company social media from a personal account. They provide a singular location for employees to find new content, review company social media policy, and find pre-written and pre-approved verbiage to use when sharing posts on social media. These all-in-one programs are more than just convenient for staff to use, they also allow you to track and analyze how frequently your team is engaging with corporate posts. Some of our larger asset management or wealth management clients who face compliance requirements may use these types of software to feed pre-approved posts to their associates. Make sure to coordinate amplifying company posts with these programs.
Reward employee participation
Another tactic to increase engagement is to incentivize employees to share posts on social media by holding contests or competitions or offering rewards for high rates of engagement Things like company swag, team lunches or other gifts can be powerful incentives to get your team to interact more with your company’s posts.
As employees increasingly engage with your company’s social media accounts, you might consider making a point about sharing positive successes and acknowledging the part your staff played in supporting your social media effort. A simple “thank you” can go a long way in encouraging your team to continue to share, like or comment on corporate posts.