As a financial marketer, you probably know how difficult it can be to grow engagement on social media. Plus, with the levels of compliance surrounding financial marketing, most institutions involve multiple team members, with various levels of experience, to executive social strategies. These workflows can often become disjointed and sluggish – preventing you from realizing your campaign goals. But, as a brand, you have a great resource to fall back upon to help communicate your marketing and community initiatives: your employees. From sharing your news to providing content inspiration, integrating your employees into your social strategy is key for success. Below are five ways to help drive employee participation on your social channels.
Share Social Media Policies
Social Media policies are critical for outlining expectations of performance and brand guidelines, but many employees don’t know where to find it or if they can receive a copy. If employees don’t know what is – and is not – appropriate for posting online, they’ll be too worried about potential repercussions and fail to interact with your content. Spur your employee engagement by making your policy easily accessible. Sharing it internally or having a training session on the do’s and don’ts on social platforms. This is also a great way to help educate your employees on all of your active accounts and how they can contribute to your organization’s goals. In short, making your corporate policies easily accessible to remove barriers for interaction.
Pro Tip
When you host a training session for employees, encourage them to ask suggest ideas for social initiatives or community improvements. They’re members of the same community and could provide great insight to problems where your financial brand could help.
Encourage Involvement
Whether it’s sharing one post from your brand a month or commenting on posts, you need to communicate your hopes for engagement to your employees. Simple encouragements, such as “we would love if you would comment on our non-profit highlight,” can go a long way. Aim to have 5 – 15 employees interact with your social posts on a monthly basis. Celebrating them as your “social media champions” is also a good way to encourage further participation .
Pro Tip
Spark further engagement when you interact with employees’ engagement. A simple “thanks for sharing!” or like on their post will encourage them to engage in the future. To best ignite these connections, learn how our Community Spark Product can help.
Feature Employees
Especially effective on platforms like LinkedIn, employee spotlights offer some of the highest organic engagement for a business page. Add this type of content to your marketing calendar on a monthly, biweekly or quarterly basis, depending on the size of your institution. Sharing employees’ stories will make them more likely to share the post to their personal. This could lead to your brand reaching a wider audience and raise your brand awareness.
Pro Tip
Add meaningful personality to these posts by having employees fill a list of insightful questions to get to know them. While their positions and years of service is a great thing to highlight, other information such as their hobbies and interests can help bring life to your brand.
Introducing Community Spark: Ignite Community Connections. Learn more.
Offer Incentives
Gamify your employee engagement by offering rewards or making a leaderboard for social sharing. Host competitions where the branch with the most employee social engagement wins a prize, such as a free lunch or jeans day. Giving awards for “most engaged employee” can spark conversations, communication and engagement amongst your teams. You’ll get extra points for letting your employees choose either the competition or prize.
Pro Tip
Set clearly defined rules for winning. Removing this ambiguity can help promote the fun and involvement by everyone. Review one of our webinars to see how you can make these types of events truly effective.
Ask for Feedback
If your employees still aren’t interacting with your content, ask them for constructive feedback. Is there content you could be posting that would make them more excited to engage? Should you feature community businesses more often? Simply put, you may just not be creating the right type of content. Plus, if employees aren’t interested, it’s likely the rest of your followers won’t be either. Adjusting your social media strategy around employee feedback may be the hidden key to improving your social campaigns.
Pro Tip
Form a small committee (eight people at most) to give feedback and ideas on how to help your pages grow. Hosting a monthly meeting to gather ideas will help you stay on top of your content calendar and internal communications.
Whether or not they show it on social, your biggest fans are typically your employees. Though varying levels of experience on social can be an initial barrier, it doesn’t have to stop you from engaging your employees online. How do you get your employees to interact with you on social? Tweet us @SocialAssurance and let us know!
