6 Ways to Use Your Social Media Networks to Broadcast Company Culture

Which came first, your company or its culture? If you are running a growing small business, it’s clear that company culture is an important part of your objectives, albeit one that gets put on the back burner often. But you are proud of what your company is becoming and the culture that’s emerging out of that. Your social media is a great way to express that company culture and nurture it—or, if you’re not careful, destroy it.

Today we are going to offer ways to enhance your culture on social media, both for those looking in and the ones on the inside.

Why Is Social Media Important to Company Culture?

Well, first it’s in the name. It’s the media and communications that allows you to be social and to express how you and your team socializes. Social media is definitely your public voice and what you put out there is representative of your entire brand. By taking advantage of your social media channels, making sure you portray the right corporate culture, and boasting a sense of team spirit, you can recruit and retain the right people.

So how do you betray that culture through your social media networks?

Have a social media policy—and allow anyone to participate in the creation of it! Policies are usually generated by human resources and don’t typically involve the actual human resources who have to adhere to them. Invite any interested employees to get involved in the building of your social media strategy and guidelines. Especially try to enlist the help of your customer reps since what gets said will inevitably involve customer queries. By crowdsourcing those involved in setting policies, especially those that affect company culture, more people will remember and work to stick to them.

Empower employees to share on your behalf. First blocking social media at the office is an arcane practice that shows you don’t trust your employees. Instead, acknowledge that they will be using it and trust them to use it in the right way. In fact, leverage your internal social networks to enable a culture of gratitude and transparency. And then make sure your employees are aware of the company’s moments of pride and are encouraged to share them on their own.

Share your team spirit on social media. Do you do fun team-building activities? From pair programming and corporate retreats to hackathons and holiday parties, there’s a Kodak moment in the every day moments of your office.

Have a new teammate? Brag about it on social media. Win your intramural volleyball league? Post that pic on your company Facebook or Instagram and leave an option for self-tagging. Introduce your team and your company culture in the form of full-color posts as often as possible.

Try an employee posting day. What about once a month, you welcome employees to share whatever they think is important—perhaps vetted and scheduled by a social media manager? And don't limit posts to just things about the company. You can include causes your employees support, even funny Games of Thrones references and other topical fun.

Let everyone know which events your teams are attending. You spend money to send employees to industry events and conferences. And you encourage them to attend and even speak at Meetups and other community events. But it’s often just that. Leverage these moments of sector influence, by talking about your attendance ahead using the event’s hashtag and then empower teammates to tweet photos and moments from your company accounts.

Challenge your teammates to #gopositive on #socialmedia. And now for an experiment to do with your team. Try to get everyone focusing on optimism and happiness at work for a week. Challenge them—and your social media strategy team—to only post positive things for one week. Have them sign a pledge to only #gopositive on social media, even on their own social media networks. You can even join our experiment running from September 8 through September 15—do you think you can #gopositive too?