Think social media is only useful for branding and product awareness? You’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what exceptional social media management staffing can bring to the table. Effectively leveraging the right social networks not only provides value to your customers–it can also improve job satisfaction within your own company.
Companies with happy employees outperform their competition by as much as 20%. According to a study by LinkedIn, 58% of users are proud of where they work and are willing to talk about it with others on social media and elsewhere.
Related Reading: Beyond the Buzz: How CMOs Can Tap into Unmined Social Media Gold
Happy employees are more productive, translate their energy and passion into a better experience for your customers, and enhance your overall brand. They’re more loyal and less likely to leave your organization. So it’s in your best interest to take any reasonable steps to keep your team as satisfied and engaged as possible. A sophisticated social strategy carried out by talented marketers with both social media management and internal communications staffing experience can increase employee happiness in many ways, including:
1. Reinforcing Your Corporate Culture
The first thing your business can do to create happier employees on social media is to create and support a positive workplace culture that the most talented professionals want to be a part of. This means fostering a culture in the office that supports your company’s vision and values.
One way to develop that culture involves spotlighting your employees. This not only helps your employees to feel valued, but also shows others outside the organization what the company is like to work for and attracts those who share the same vision.
Watch the Video: How to Make an Employment Brand Irresistible to Top Marketers
Some popular examples:
- Content that puts the office environment on display
- Behind-the-scenes access of what your employees are working on (with approval, of course)
- New ideas your employees have come up with for the business
- Fun facts about your employees (with their permission)
- Events and special occasions that happen within the company–birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, etc.
2. Empowering Your Team
A happy employee is one who feels recognized for their contributions and success. One way to show your employees this appreciation is to empower them to make key decisions in the customer’s best interest on social media.
When communicating with customers on social media–especially with customer support–this means entrusting some of your employees with the freedom to engage consumers online directly. This is a big show of faith, and should not be taken likely. It’s important that your social media management staffing take extra time to establish policies and training procedures to ensure appropriate social media interactions from your team.
Related Reading: 5 Key Traits to Look for in a Successful Social Media Marketer
This helps to reduce response times and increases efficiency, as the employee is not waiting for approval. This also allows employees to then create a unique, memorable experience for the customer that they did not expect. This positive experience leads to increased word of mouth, trust, and loyalty.
3. Putting Focus on the Individual
Another great way to value your employees is to encourage them to share their thoughts and expertise with your social media communities. After all, you’ve put in the hard work training them; maybe now it’s time to have a little faith in the job you’ve done.
You can achieve this on social media by giving your employees the spotlight and allowing them to showcase their expertise and personality through content creation on your social channels. Of course, you’ll still want to establish guidelines for content generation, commenting, and approval processes.
A long (but VERY informative) webinar on employee engagement from SanDisk
This is not only a great way to please your employees, but it also helps them to get more involved with the company and its goals. Here are some ways you can get your employees more involved on your social channels today:
- Live Q&As via video streaming or status updates
- Give them an opportunity to contribute to the corporate blog
- Share their new ideas & thoughts with your community and solicit feedback
4. Resisting the Urge to Micromanage
Hopefully, you can trust your employees to carry out their roles effectively and not micromanaging every task they do.
It’s understandable that companies want to protect their reputation on social media, and therefore want to approve all comments and content. However, adopting this practice actually uses up more resources, wastes time, and becomes counter-productive.
This applies to social media management, as well. You want to give employees the freedom to carry out their role to the best of their ability. This means giving them the freedom to engage with your community on social media. But it also means providing those interested in being socially active with your brand online with all the upfront training and support they need to do so safely and effectively.
This is a great way to build rapport with the company as well as humanize the brand, as it allows the social media community to get to know the employees in the process, which also helps to develop those long-term relationships.
To ensure everyone in the company is on the same page, the best way to start this process is to have your social media recruiters create a social media policy so all employees are aware of best practices on the company’s social channels.
5. Inviting Constructive Feedback
Many organizations have some kind of system in place to gather employee input and opinions. But it’s not enough to just listen to the views of your employees if you want to create a happier workforce. That requires actually taking action on the feedback they provide about your social media community.
Your employees offer you the perfect way to get direct feedback on how well your company is performing on social media. They’re often the ones to engage with customers on a daily basis, and can often provide insights into your brand’s social performance that you might not get from analytics.
Taking action on this feedback is the perfect way to not only show your employees you value their contribution and opinions, but to also allow you to find new ways to innovate and get a better handle on the famously elusive social media ROI.
Article Source: The Next Web
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