Asking Employees to Help on Social Media

We recently had a client (who happened to be a college) ask how best to enlist their student body’s help in elevating their school’s social media presence.

This was an incredibly smart and savvy ask – too often online marketers forget to leverage their brand’s most loyal supporters – their own employees (or in this case, a college’s own students) with help in gaining social media momentum. The hesitation’s easy to understand – an employee’s/student’s personal social media is their own business – so why ask? What’s the point?

My answer: Why not?

Marketers are often pleasantly surprised with how eager folks are to help their place of work market itself – even if it’s outside of working hours. All you have to do is ask! After all, what do you have to lose?

Here’s the top three things I’d ask my employees to help with if I owned a business:

1. Invite Your Friends to Like Our Social Page

Why? Inviting friends and family to like social pages is an easy tactic to significantly grow a following with people that matter – employees’ friends and family.

2. Engage With Our Content

Why? Social media algorithms (which decide what content should and shouldn’t be visible on newsfeeds) allocate significant weight to overall post engagement. The more engagement a post receives, the more likely it’ll be featured prominently on users’ newsfeeds.

3. Create Great Content and Send to Social Team

Why? Social media is a battlefield of content – with so many different publications, pages, and people on social all fighting for your attention, garnering the attention of users is a constant challenge. This means social teams have to bring their “A” game to the table – meaning only posting the best of the best, most visually appealing content.

This is where the power of crowd-sourcing comes in – employees (the more, the better) can capture insider, hard-to-capture moments marketers can’t – whether it’s a beautiful sunset on the horizon of a corporate campus, a celebratory moment with a client, or office hijinks, there’s so many moments out there ripe for showcasing on social.

The moral of the story is to just ask! What’s the worst that can happen? If the potential benefits (more followers, more engagement, better content) outweigh the costs (people deciding to keep business and personal separate), I say go for it!

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