Social media in the workplace. I imagine there are still places that ban (or try to) it. I get it–I often find myself, in the middle of a task, cruising around on Facebook, and think “how did I get here??” But by that point, I’ve lost 5 minutes I’ll never get back…
Many workplaces, I’m sure, believe that social media is bad for productivity. I just think we waste time in different ways today. In the past, it might have been a water cooler conversation, or a smoke break. Today, it’s Facebook or Instagram. It could be a lot worse.
Having said that, let’s look at how you can use your employee’s time on Facebook for the good of your company. Here are 4 ways to get your employees to help with your Social Media:
1. Build your numbers: make it a rule that all employees have to “like” the company’s Facebook page and follow them on Twitter and Instagram.
2. Give your Posts a push: Give them time once a day or once a week to check into the accounts and like, comment on or share Facebook posts, or RT Tweets, or like and comment on Instagram posts. You see, you can use your paid employees to give your posts a push. Social proof lies in numbers on Insta and Twitter, but on Facebook, it’s even more important, as it factors into FB’s algorithm. The more likes, comments and shares a post gets, the more views it gets, so use your employees to give it that oomph.
3. Have employees share company social media: You can ask them to do a #FollowFriday on Twitter and/or Instagram for your company. They could also share your company’s Facebook page to their own personal FB profile, with a request to their friends, asking for Likes to the page.
4. Use your employees to gather information: chances are, you have one person inside your company who is responsible for the social media. They run your feeds. Chances are also good that this person is responsible for both created content (like sharing your blog posts, for example) and curated content (which is content related to your brand, but that comes from other sources). Curating content is a big job, and it takes a lot of time. You can create a system where, if your employees find an interesting article they think might be good to share on the company’s social media, they know how to do so. It could be something as simple as a public google doc everyone has access to, or you could simply give everyone the email address of the person in charge of the social media feeds and say “any time you find something interesting on the web, send it here.” You could also use an internal messaging system if you have one. This is a great way to crowdsource information.
There you have it! Four ways you can get your employees to work for you on social media. All those hours of looking at cat videos at work have got to be good for something, right??
