The Secret To Grow Your Business Social Media Profile

20 Easy-To-Implement Business Social Media Tips

Biggest Secret to Growing YOur Business Social MEdia ProfileWant to know the biggest secret to grow your business social media profile?

Of course you do! (What marketer worth their salt doesn’t???)

Before I tell you, it’s important to understand that most businesses are NOT power media upstarts like Upworthy and ViralNova that average 60,000 social shares per article and get 99% of their social shares from Facebook.

But I’m sorry to burst your bubble. Most companies need to work VERY hard to build their business social media profile and maximize their distribution.

Most companies need to use a mix of social media networks and they still can’t compete with these viral super stars.

 Tweet This Brands use an average of 7.5 social media platforms according to L2 Research.

L2’s results are similar to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs data; they found B2B firms used 6 social media networks and B2C firms used 7 social media networks.

Business Social Media Tip

The BIGGEST secret to growing your business social media profile:
Encourage and support your employees to share your content on social media using their personal accounts. 

Biggest Secret to Grow SOcial Media Profile

When employees use their personal accounts, your employees reach family, friends and colleagues they know personally. As Nielsen’s findings underscore: people trust people they know. They don’t trust advertising in any format.

By encouraging your employees to share your brand or company’s content on social media, you expand your social media reach exponentially. Hootsuite research confirmed these results. Connect via Hootsuite New York-1

20 Business social media tips

Here are 5 easy steps to get your employees on board and contribute to raising your business’s social media profile. Biggest Secret to Growing YOur Business Social MEdia Profile

1. Encourage employees to share your organization’s content via their personal social media accounts.

To this end, tap into the 5 keys of social sharing and The Psychology of Sharing: Why People Share Online research conducted by The New York Times.

  1. Appeal to customers’ motivation to connect with other people.
  2. Build trust with your audience to get your information shared.
  3. Simplify your message to facilitate sharing.
  4. Give your audience a reason to act, NOW.
  5. Go beyond sharing content to build relationships with your audience.

Business Social Media Tip

Of course, when dealing with your staff, be transparent in your request. Explain that you’re seeking to expand your organization’s social media reach and would appreciate their help.

Ideally, your request shouldn’t sound like a “big brother” order, rather it should give your staff an incentive to participate.

To this end you must understand what motivates your target to be active. You should ask “What’s in it for me?” for your employees. This means what’s the benefit for them personally.

Depending on your firm, your employees and their jobs, it may take as little as letting employees use social media during business hours to making it part of their job description.

This translates to helping them to build their various social media presences because by extension it expands your business reach.

Actionable Business Social Media Tips:

  1. Help employees improve their social media presence. While this may be difficult for some managers to appreciate, ensure that your staff represents your firm and reflects well on your brand. This includes changing job titles on LinkedIn so that they are easier to understand.
  2. Have a professional photograph for each employee. This is one way to ensure that your staff has consistent business profiles that portray your brand effectively.
  3. Take short videos of your employees. They can talk about themselves to show the personal side of your business or answer customer questions about your product offering. It can be a great way to get your firm’s experts to convey their wealth of product knowledge.
  4. Encourage employees to link to your website in their personal profiles. This encourages their social media contacts to check your firm out.
  5. Ask employees to share your business’s social media shares. Consider an internal contest to see which employee does the best.
  6. Get employees to contribute to your firm’s groups or communities (depending on the social media network.)

2. Create a set of corporate social media guidelines.

Roche, a global pharmaceutical firm, has 14 guidelines for its employees and customers. Even the US Army has explicit social media documentation that’s over 50 pages of guidelines and related details.

The bottom line: Employees must understand the information they’ve access to in the course of their work roles and the need for its confidentiality.

Actionable Business Social Media Tips:

  1. Define what your employees can and can’t do when they represent your firm and when they’re engaged in social media in their personal lives. Where appropriate, let your staff know what the consequences are when they disobey these rules.
  2. Monitor employee social media activity. Ensure that it’s aligned with your business objectives and brand.
  3. Respond quickly and decisively when there’s an issue. Your goal is to protect your brand. To this end, ensure that you have a social media crisis plan ready to respond. (BTW, Gini Dietrich’s book, Spin Sucks has a great section on how to handle this type of crisis.)

3. Provide your employees with social media training.

You can’t assume that your younger employees are social media whiz kids at driving business results on various networks just because they’re under 30.

To ensure your entire staff has equal footing and supports your business objectives on social media, it’s important to provide social media training.

Actionable Business Social Media Tips:

  1. Supply staff with the skills to represent your firm on social media. This differs from how they engage as private individuals. (BTW—we help businesses by providing this training.)
  2. Provide appropriate tools. Help your employees to do a better job of extending your social media reach.
  3. Break down the silos between different departments. This can be particularly useful for sales and marketing. Throw a fun event that involves your team and customers. (Don’t forget to take pictures!)

4. Help employees to create content and related social media postings.

To maximize the impact of each social media share, provide the content that your staff shares.

Actionable Business Social Media Tips:

  1. Notify employees when new content is published. An easy way to accomplish this is to send an internal emailing with preformatted social shares.
  2. Provide a variety of different social media resources that employees can easily modify such as photographs.
  3. Ensure that employees have access to editorial, creative and technology staff to support their social media engagement. Remove the fear of failing or looking bad on social media. This is particularly important for titlesUpworthy Title Test
  4. Encourage your sales team to blind copy (aka BCC) marketing every time they answer a customer question. This is a great recommendation from Marcus SheridanIt takes the work out of answering customer questions. Your marketing team can then transform this information into quality, social media friendly content.
  5. Incorporate social media shares in employees’ signature files. Of course, this assumes everyone has a consistent file that can be modified centrally. This has the benefit of going to people’s personal email addresses, avoiding the junk mail folder.

5. Reward employees who are social media stars and drive results.

At a minimum, give employees recognition for their hard work; it can be an internal social media employee of the month or other monetary incentive.

Actionable Business Social Media Tips:

  1. Ask employees to include a call-to-action in their social media shares. This helps drive prospect activity.
  2. Share employees’ social sharing activity with the rest of your staff. While broadening your social media audience, this provides an example that encourages others to contribute their best stuff.
  3. Spotlight an employee of the week on your blog. Then get your employees to share this content. Orbit Media has a series of interviews on their blog. It’s a great step towards company transparency. Business Social Media TipBTW: Many organizations do this offline with an employee of the month.

When it comes to business social media, it takes a company. To build your organization’s business social media profile, every employee must contribute.

To ensure that your staff’s social media input reflects well on your brand and enhances your social media standing, you must provide your employees with the tools they need to succeed.

What has your experience been encouraging your staff to support your company on social media?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

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