5 Tips for Getting Your Employees to Share and Engage on Social Media

January 08, 2019

2 Minute Read

How to Encourage Employees to Share on Social Media

If you own a business and have asked your employees to help you by sharing some of your content with their social media networks, you might be wondering what holds them back from doing so. You might be thinking about how you can get more of them to share your business content on social sites.

“I don’t use social media for business.”
“I am not sure what I am supposed to share.”
“I just don’t have time to share much on social media.”
“I don’t want to overwhelm my friends and acquaintances with info about my job.”
“I don’t think that my network is large enough to matter much.”

If your employees were candid with you, they would give you some of the reasons above for not participating. Here are five ways to get your employees to engage:

Educate your employees about the value of social media engagement for business

Approximately 30% of your employees don’t use social media for business. Help them understand the value of personal branding online and help them see that some social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are expressly for business.

Put an employee social media advocacy plan in place

12% of employees don’t share business content from their employer because there is not a plan in place to encourage them to do so. Make sure you are clearly communicating which content to share with some guidance about where best to share it. Many social media management tools expressly for employee engagement exist. Experiment. Find one to use to regularly ask your employees to spread your shareworthy content.

Make it easy to do

14% of employees do not share company content because they do not have time. Sharing should be as simple as pressing a share button. A great many tools exist to make sharing company content simpler. Pick a tool and provide your employees with some simple training to ensure that sharing the content from your daily email takes only a few seconds.

Offer a variety of content in different formats

15% of employees pass on sharing content because they do not want to overwhelm their social networks with information about their work. In part, this can be solved by doing some of the sharing on social networks expressly for business, such as LinkedIn. In addition, part of any good social media employee advocacy program is having shareworthy content in a variety of formats to avoid fatiguing the network.

Close the loop

8% of employees don’t share because they do not think that they have large enough social networks to play any significant marketing role. By sharing with hashtags, even an employee with a small network can expand his or her reach. One of the best reasons to consider one of the many tools to make social media marketing easier for employees is that these tools help close the loop. Many of the best ones show the employee the influence that each of his or her shares has.

If you need more employees sharing your best content, Be Found Online can help you reach that goal. Contact us today!

(Source: 2017 Employee Advocacy Impact Study by The Marketing Advisory Network)

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James Willingham

James describes his job at BFO as ‘a dream career,’ and we describe him as a ‘dream employee.’ Firstly, James is a foster parent, who has used his skills in digital marketing to promote foster parenting. Family and inter-personal relationships are paramount, and he incorporates his talent and caring persona in building successful SEM strategies for regional and national accounts and his expertise in paid social advertising on Facebook.