Getting employees involved in social media

11 Creative Ways to Boost Employee Engagement in Social Media

Social media is an effective, low-cost way to market your company's products or services, and is also a great way to keep customers engaged while expressing your brand's mission. However, to make the most of a platform's potential, you need to be active and strategic, which can require your entire team's involvement. To get your employees excited to participate, consider the following advice from the members of Young Entrepreneur Council.

What's one way a company can get employees more involved with its social media efforts while also making it fun? What impact will this have?

1. Feature team members and tell their stories

Make it part of your content campaign to feature team members and tell their stories. This will not only help personify your company, but it can also help your team members feel more valued. In the meantime, you might learn a lot about them that you previously didn't know, helping you develop a closer relationship. —Andy Karuza, NachoNacho

2. Share behind-the-scenes moments

One way companies can get more of their employees involved with their social media efforts is for employees to send pictures of “office moments” so that the marketing team can post them on the company profile and tag them. You can even assign an employee to take over the Instagram handle of the company for a day and upload stories of day-to-day life in the office. —Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.ME

3. Write a “welcome” post about new hires

We craft a celebratory welcome post on professional and social media platforms whenever we add a new member to our team. We encourage our team members to engage with the post. As we are a mostly remote business, this makes the new hire feel more welcome and accepted into the company culture. —Jack Perkins, CFO Hub

4. Gamify the experience

A very good way of getting your employees involved in your social media efforts is to gamify the social media experience. You can do that by rewarding the employees who get a certain amount of engagement in the posts. This will keep the excitement going and your people will proactively get involved in your social media efforts. —Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite

5. Have “funny meme” contests

Sometimes, we will have contests where team members try to come up with the funniest meme based on a specific idea. I'll usually provide a small cash prize for the winner—enough to make the competition interesting, but not so much to cause hard feelings after someone wins. This encourages creative thinking and helps to build a strong company culture. —Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy

6. Empower your team to post company shout-outs

We believe that empowered women empower women, and as an all-woman law firm, we use that theme in social media. Our employees often give shout-outs to our firm on their own personal accounts because they are proud of working for a company that is aligned with their values. This also encourages reposts of our company's social media activity for news within the firm and for our client wins. —Givelle Lamano, Oakland DUI Attorneys

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7. Highlight employees and their pets

Everyone loves a little recognition, but when their furry friends get involved it makes it even more fun. Even if someone doesn't want their picture used, they will usually supply a photo of a pet. Plus, you have the added benefit of your customers and other potential hires seeing that you recognize your team and that you're real people. —Kevin Getch, Webfor

8. Create monthly themes

Companies can get more team involvement on social media by creating fun themes each month for employees to use in their daily lives. For example, team members could post a funny way to use their product with a company-specific hashtag. Turning this into a competition for the best post could sweeten the deal, along with driving more customer engagement when winners are chosen. —Richard Fong, PageKits

9. Reward them for participating in or creating events

Reward your team for participating in and creating events that are shareworthy. Participating in charity runs or events is a great way to get your team to share and to impress values upon your audience. Engaging in something that benefits your community or asking your team if there is a charity that they want to get behind is also a great way to encourage team members to get involved. —Matthew Capala, Alphametic

10. Create a custom group for follower interaction

One way to get your employees involved with your social media efforts is to create a custom group for your followers to engage with your brand. We encourage our team to interact with the group so they can better understand the goals and pain points of our target audience. We've seen tremendous growth as our team discovers new things about our customers that we couldn't find out any other way. —Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

11. Let employees take over the accounts for a day

One way to get employees more interested in your social media growth is to let them take over your brand's social media accounts for a day. You can set some guidelines ahead of time, but empower people to post what they think your brand should post. You'll get some great ideas and create a human approach to your content that will resonate with your audience. —Blair Williams, MemberPress