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5 Ways To Encourage Social Media Employee Participation

Do you find it difficult to get other people in your company involved in social media?

Maybe they think only one person should contribute, or maybe they don’t understand what their contribution should be.

The people in your company who work most closely with clients and customers are the people that have the best information to use for social media. These are the people that:

Deal with every day questions
Fix the same problems over and over
Test new products and services
Hear client opinions on the company
Want to provide the best service possible
Collect interest for new products/services
Set the tone for public relations

These are the best people for social media, because they already have relationships with your clients and customers.

Social media only helps further their reach, and therefore your company’s reach into the customers’ lives.

How to Get Employees Involved?

The problem lies in getting these people involved in social media, without taking away from their current work, or causing problems with the social media manager overseeing your strategy and activity. But alas, where there is a will there is a way.

Incentivize Getting Social

A social media expert will always appreciate feedback and input from others in the company who have ideas and interesting thoughts to add to either the blog or the social media accounts. One way to get other people to contribute is to make it worth their time and effort.

Scenario 1: A Monthly Incentive Drawing

Set up a form on your internal website where other workers can submit their ideas, encourage even the smallest idea. Every month for each submission they get 1 credit in a drawing for a local gift card. The form should automatically send to the social media expert you have, to review at their convenience. The form can easily track who is sending the suggestion via their email address.

Scenario 2: Pay For Their Ideas

For every idea actually used in social or blogging, pay the person who submited the idea. For blog posts consider paying $25, for social media updates $5, for social media promotions or give aways $30. You’ll get a lot of ideas, and many you won’t want to use at all, but the good ones will be of use to your expert.

Scenario 3: Let them post

If your office is small enough you can designate certain employees to contribute to the campaigns and sign their updates with -MG (their initials). For some employees they will actually enjoy being part of the social team, and you can make it worth their time by adding some kind of bonus to their pay.

Scenario 4: Thank them for their ideas

It might sound like a small thing, but simply thanking your employees for their ideas and contributions could be all they need to get on board. By thanking them, you are acknowledging their thoughts, and their place in your company. You make them feel like they matter, and that is something everyone wants to feel, especially at work.

Scenario 5: Monthly Social Media Employee of the Month

Your fans will love meeting a new employee each month on social media, and your employees will want to answer comments about themselves. Each month choose from the socially active employees one to spotlight for the month, and have the social media expert include them in the graphics or monthly updates.

There are a lot of ways to get your employees interested in helping with social media. It’s the new customer service and everyone who deals with the public needs to be trained in that appropriately.

If the above ideas do not help, brainstorm with your social expert to see what ideas they have. You still need the expert even if employees are involved, for strategy, reporting, and taking care of the day to day posting and changes, but having the employees participate will make it even more rewarding for the entire company.

If you have questions about getting your employees on board, ask below. I look forward to helping!