Increasing Employee Advocacy on Social Media
- Written by Sarah Russo, Head of UX Content at digital marketing service provider Localsearch
Employees on social media can often be a pain point for business owners. However, a simple share of a social media post on an employee’s own social network can actually have a big impact on the success of a business, increasing brand awareness, boosting website traffic, even bringing in new business.
As a small business owner, you may work hard on your own social media presence, but do you know how to boost the engagement your own staff can create?
Why Businesses Should Encourage Employee Engagement on Social Media
Recent social controversies, such as the Apple iOS 14 update, media bargaining code conversations and broader consumer attitude shifts have proven that being active and engaged across all social media platforms is an unavoidable part of success in 2021.
While you can say as much as you like about how amazing your business is online, it means a lot more coming from others.
At Localsearch — one of Australia’s leading digital marketing services — our employees actively use and grow their LinkedIn networks. In fact, our staff are so engaged with us on LinkedIn, we were named as one of Oceania’s top 10 most active companies on social media, based on the percentage of employees who shared content.
So, how do you get to the point of your employees willingly and actively being the greatest advocate of your business?
How to Encourage Employees to Engage with Your Business on Social Media
The key to increasing employee advocacy of your business is to create social media content they want to share.
Create a positive, diverse work culture.
A top priority for us is to create a forward-thinking, energetic culture of passionate marketers who foster a positive work environment. This has naturally created a diverse workplace, which we actively promote across our socials.
For example, Localsearch’s leadership team is 40% female, with the national average sitting at 31.5%, while our SEO team defies trends at 65% female. Through sharing positive diversity stories like these that have put Localsearch in a positive spotlight many times and has been advocated by our team.
Hero your employees’ accomplishments and activity.
Publicly sharing the accomplishments and activities of your employees is one of the most crucial ways to increase staff advocacy on social media. Easy ways to share your staff on your socialis include recognising:
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* New starters.
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* Long-term work anniversaries.
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* Staff member of the month or other awards.
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* Results from projects.
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* Team outings.
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* Outstanding achievements.
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* Shoutouts ‘just because’.
We regularly post our social team across our many platforms to help people put a face to a name when they message us online. This helps humanise our business and help create that bond between our team, audience and clients.
Be vocal about your business’s success.
Something you should already be doing on your social media is sharing your business successes. This doesn’t need to be as extravagant as winning awards either.
However, going one step further and mentioning and/or tagging your team involved in the project can increase workplace culture and staff engagement with the posts.
By championing your people, they’re going to champion your business. With these simple changes, you can increase workplace culture, amplify productivity and boost your marketing efforts — all through showing appreciation for your team.
About Sarah Russo
As Head of Marketing & UX Content at digital marketing service provider Localsearch, Sarah Russo is responsible for developing and implementing organic user friendly content across the business. She has an extensive career with more than a decade of experience working across various industries in social media direction, EDM creation, content and copy creation, traditional marketing, design and more.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahrussocontent/
About Localsearch
Localsearch provides a complete digital marketing solution catered for small businesses. Founded and headquartered in regional Queensland, Localsearch has been supporting 28,000 customers for over 28 years. Localsearch has been nominated for multiple prestigious industry awards for a number of years in a row, including the Google Premier Partner Awards for the Growing Businesses Online Category.
For more information visit https://business.localsearch.com.au/
