For true social media success, it’s not enough to post strong content to your firm’s social media accounts, you also need to tap into the critical social networks of your employees — particularly the superstars with more than 1000 connections — to ensure maximum reach and engagement.
Why? Because many of their important contacts are not following your firm’s company page.
Also, there is no possible way to ensure that every single person in your LinkedIn network (whether if they are following your company page or connected to an individual) will see your LinkedIn posts. The algorithm of LinkedIn does not enable you to that and neither does the way in which someone’s news feed is set.
What you can do to ensure maximum engagement for your posts is to train your employees on how to effectively use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to share and like content from your firm company page and more importantly, from their own personal LinkedIn accounts, so you can tap into reaching the individuals in their powerful networks. I’ve heard some call this employee advocacy – and there’s no doubt that employees can be among your most important brand ambassadors.
Training may involve sitting with individuals and showing them the ins and outs of LinkedIn — right now during COVID-19, you obviously can’t do it in person, but you certainly can do a virtual trainings and create a handout with easy step-by-step instructions on how to post content to social media. I’ve been doing this with my clients, and it’s worked well.
I find most business professionals just need a little bit of guidance on how to post (the difference between liking, commenting and sharing) and what to say when they post (intro text using the @ sign along with a few hashtags for maximum impact). Show versus tell is very helpful here.
Get everyone on board and comfortable with using social media in order to reach the widest possible online audience and have maximum reach for your content.
Having your employees be more visible also helps them build their own brands and keeps them top of mind with their LinkedIn network, which is a win-win for them.
Reach out to me with any questions on these tips or if you need help with virtual training. Stay safe and well.