When your employees engage with your social media posts the benefits can be significant. Their engagement can help to boost your posts’ reach, building brand awareness and ultimately sales.

By sharing or otherwise engaging with your content, your employees are helping to bring it beyond your existing audience base and to their own network of contacts thus reaching a new and yet related and relevant audience. Moreover, when employees share your content, they also increase its credibility among its viewers. According to LinkedIn, 76% of individuals surveyed by LinkedIn said that they were more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than content shared by brands, and content that is shared by employees has twice the level of engagement as content published on an organisation’s business page.

Reasons why employees don’t engage with their employer’s social media content

For many organizations, their employees engage with their social media posts to some degree. But there are many other organisations where this is not the case. This can be for a myriad of reasons:

1. ‘It’s not my job

2. I don’t have enough time

3. I don’t feel comfortable using social media during work

4. My sector is highly regulated and I’m not sure what I can say or not

5. The content isn’t really relevant to me or my followers

There are a number of things you can do to change these mindsets and to make it easier for your employees to engage with your content.

1 / First things first

• Ask all new employees to update their profile to reflect that they have joined your organisation

• Use the ‘notify employees’ button (wisely) to let employees know when you have posted content

• Tag employees in content that features them or is otherwise relevant to them

2 / Explain the benefits of engaging with work related posts to your employees

Tell your employees why your company is on social media in the first place – to raise brand awareness, increase relevance and credibility with core audiences, generate leads, attract personnel etc.

Let your employees know that when they like, or comment on, or share your posts, they not only help the posts to be seen by more people, but the company they work for is seen in a positive light.

Show them how your social media presence affects their area of work. For example, by raising brand awareness and credibility, the sales team benefits from easier access to buyers, the HR team benefits from reaching more potential employees who will fit in with the company culture, the engineering team benefits from increased credibility and networking opportunities and so on.

Finally, explain how engaging with their employer posts and posting their own relevant content can help them to build their own strong personal brand, showcase their expertise, increase networking opportunities and further develop their career.

3 / Create a social media policy and provide training

Support your employees’ social media activities with a social media policy. When employees are not clear on whether they can share content or what content they should share or how they should speak, they are less inclined to engage, professionally, on social media. Having clear guidelines helps to avoid confusion and supports consistency. If you have a social media policy, make sure it is easy to find and provide training for both new recruits and your existing employees who want it. If you work in a regulated sector, ensure that all personnel who wish to become employee advocates have undertaken training on the dos and don’ts for your sector.

4 / Post content that is engaging

Unique, creative and appealing content will encourage engagement from all audiences, including employees. Use a mix of formats, from videos and gifs to infographics and animations.

5 / Feature your employees in your content

Featuring your employees can include work related ‘meet the team’, ‘behind the scenes’, ‘a day in the life’ type content. It can also involve celebrating your employees achievements, whether personal or professional - from gaining a new qualification, winning an award, speaking at a seminar, to taking part in charitable activities, or major life events such as retirements. Where your employees are involved in non-work related company initiatives such as diversity and inclusion, it is a wonderful opportunity to showcase them, whether at events or through video conversations. There are many ways to showcase and appreciate your people, providing valuable and interesting content for your audiences and at the same time highlighting your positive organisational culture.

6 / Encourage more employee-generated content

All employees have their own perspective on their place of work, and what they do. Asking your employees for their unique thoughts and content ideas will give them a shared sense of purpose, and increase their feeling of adding value to your organisation. Where employees create their own content, make sure you have a social media policy in place, and help them by providing training, editing and other support services.

7 / Support employee advocacy visibly

Your employees are not restricted to sharing content that you have already posted on social media. If you have a company newsletter or intranet, these are both good tools to disseminate shareable content with your team.

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Make sure that everyone in your organisation is aware of the value of employee advocacy, whether through team meetings, training, or reinforcement by leaders etc. and encourage a culture of engagement.

Finally – be real, and nurture a positive and open culture in your organisation. Whatever you are doing, whether it is bringing a new product or service to market, or running an event, or opening a new store, make sure your employees are not only fully in the loop at the appropriate time, but that they have a chance to try the product or service, see a demo, see the event line-up etc... A positive open culture will help to bring your employees along on your journey so that your employees become as excited by the journey as you are, and want to engage in the story-telling.