SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY: 5 WAYS TO INVOLVE YOUR TEAM ON SOCIAL TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT
Growing engagement on social media is hard. Most social media engagement strategies are all about using attention-grabbing words, showcasing an intriguing picture, or creating fun stories. What if, instead of looking to your followers for engagement, , you garnered engagement from the inside to inspire your followers to do the same ? What if you put the social in social media by getting your employees to be social, not just at work, but also online?
That means inviting your team to like your posts, occasionally comment, and shout you out on social media. It’s not such a crazy idea when you think about it because this social media engagement strategy is based on inspiring change by being the change. Let’s say you want five more comments on each Instagram post. You talk to your employees about that goal and on your next post, three employees comment on it. An hour later, one of your followers responds to one of the employee’s comments, and another follower is inspired by all the comments to add their own. Just like that, you’ve reached your goal of 5 more comments.
An added bonus to this strategy is that your social content will improve. Now that your whole team is looking out for your posts, there will be more eyes on quality control. Encourage your employees to provide feedback about what they do and do not like about your posts. Since they are now interacting with your content, they can see what type of wording and content best inspires engagement.
HOW TO INVOLVE YOUR TEAM WITH A SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
There is more than one way to involve your team in your social media engagement strategy. Below, we’ve outlined five ways to do so.
BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT YOUR GOALS
If you encourage your team to like your posts and occasionally comment, they will probably do it for a few weeks before slowly forgetting about it. Instead, tell them why their likes matter. Informing them of your engagement goals will give them more reason to participate.
KEEP YOUR TEAM IN THE LOOP
Like I mentioned above, your team members will lose motivation. To keep them on task and interested, update them on your social analytics. Show them how their likes, comments, and shares have inspired other people to interact with your posts. More shares and comments will push your post to the top of more people’s feed, and your analytics will reflect that. Let your team know that because of their engagement, your posts have reached double the amount of people than usual. That’s extra inspiring because more brand reach means more sales!
TURN IT INTO A GAME
This one needs little explanation as to how it will get your team involved. A game gives an incentive and it’s fun! The challenging part is coming up with ideas for the game. First, choose a prize or incentive. Maybe you can offer up a gift card, company gear, or something bigger such as a prepaid meal for two at a fancy restaurant. The game could be simple, like whoever likes the most posts across all social media platforms each month wins a prize. It could be a competition between different departments to see who engages most on social media. . A more complicated option would be to hide “clues” for a riddle in your posts. For instance, the title of a blog post could be a clue for the answer to a riddle. Anything is possible as long as you make it fun!
POST ABOUT THE TEAM
With their permission of course. Spotlight each team member by asking the team to send in a photo and comment about themselves. Then, introduce your team by posting their submissions to your company’s social media. This is a great way to engage the team as well as your followers. Why? Because it’s personal. When an employee sees a post about their coworker on social media, they will probably like and comment on it because it’s their friend.
MAKE IT EASY
To get the team started, send them an email with a link to each social channel so they can go though and like your posts. If a post relates to a certain department or team member, tag them in it.
TAKEAWAYS
When implementing employee participation into your social media engagement strategy, remember that your team needs an incentive to get involved. The whole process should be fairly simple. Helping your team understand how their participation affects your social media performance is an incentive for them to keep engaging. Sending them reminders and links to content makes it easier for them to access cross-channel posts, especially for those who don’t check their social media often.
The most important thing to know about this strategy is that if you force things, it won’t be effective. If you tell your team they have to comment on five posts a week, their comments will be generic. However, if you tell them their engagement matters because it will inspire other people’s engagement and lead to more brand reach, they will want to participate in a more authentic way.
