In the specific
business climate that urges us all to get familiar with digital strategies and
leverage their huge potential, companies expect of their employees to presume
the role of brand ambassadors. In relation to that, business heads are choosing
to delegate their social media strategies to specific teams or, alternatively,
some of them are trying to turn their entire staff into a thriving social media
army.
While both tactics
have their advantages and pitfalls, the introduction of social media training
to the office is, beyond any doubt, a quintessential strategy for success.
Here’s how to make social media superstars out of your already hard-working
employees.
1.
Help Employees Understand How an Online Presence Might Promote Their
Careers
Influencers
might bid differently, but social media presence requires a lot of time.
Additionally, it’s a strategy that needs to be developed organically, and as
such, it implies a natural and spontaneous approach. For no other reason, it’s
paramount that your employees understand the importance of social media in the workplace,
just as well as how to complete their newly assigned tasks in the most
productive and fastest way.
This, however, means that social media embassy needs to be a voluntary action. The problem is – if something as important as this is voluntary, how to make it thrive despite the general lack of enthusiasm within your staff? As always, the most effective solution is to generate excitement by offering concrete intents. Open your conference room, present a viable plan that won’t take up much of their work time and explain how participating can help establish and promote them as experts in their niche and, consequently, improve their own careers.
2. Identify Social Media Minglers in the Office and Leverage Their
Skills
On the other
hand, you certainly already have a solid number of social media minglers in
your midst, and you can expect them to be especially interested in using their
online personas for promoting your business as well. It’s a great chance these
socially active employees have already built their presence across a majority
of channels, and the only thing left to do is to asses which networks and
approaches would be most effective for achieving your business social media
campaigns.
On your part,
this implies a thorough market analysis that will directly determine your
target audience and consequently help you choose your main marketing channels wisely.
Once your social media-savvy employees know where to aim their business-related
posts, your conversion rates will quickly hit the roof.
3.
Provide Shareable Content, Sources and Streamlining Tools
It’s necessary
to provide your social media trainees with content, sources and assistance
tools that will help streamline the process and save up their valuable time. If
you need them to be engaged on their personal time as well, you will certainly
have to equip them with technology and 4G phone deals paid by the company. A number
of online tools like Buffer, HootSuite, Bundlepost and Everypost can be used
for shortening the sharing process, while content creation will still need to
be outsourced or delegated to a specific member of the team and delivered to
employees ready for sharing.
4.
Schedule a Social Media Training
For the rest of
the team, basic social media training will be unavoidable. By the time you
propose this idea, they will already know the benefits of contributing for both
themselves and the entire company, and they will most likely be interested in
taking up the challenge.
Now, you can do
the training yourself or delegate this task to a professional; either way, you
should remember some of the essential steps of making this course a pleasant,
informative and educational experience for each trainee involved. Expect
initial confusion, but prevent frustration by avoiding social media jargon,
setting realistic expectations and treating every employee as an individual
with unique learning habits. If instructing on your own, these 5 steps might help you out:
1. Make sure your employees
understand the role that social media has in the workplace and present them
with some guidelines on social media behaviour.
2. Propose a brandability talk,
explain how it relates to social media presence and instruct them how to
represent your company’s brand in the best possible way.
3. During the third step, your
trainees should learn how to establish their professional brand image in the
online environment as binary option, as well as the most successful practices for building their
network.
4. Here’s where the employees
should become familiar with sharing strategies that create customer engagement.
5. Finally – and this step will
probably apply to only a number of your employees, since it does require a lot
of time and creativity, as well as the special set of skills – basic social
media training should teach more about content creation.
Once your socially-engaged employees have been instructed on how to make their daily online presence suitable for your business goals and the rest of the team trained to build their own online identities to both their and the company’s benefit, your digital agendas will steadily progress until they are ultimately run by a well-oiled machine of social media superstars your employees will certainly become.
