Employees as Social Media Ambassadors

Employees have the potential to be your company’s biggest social media ambassadors. With everyone #WFH and spending a lot more time online looking at LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, it’s a perfect time to engage new audiences. Follow these guidelines to learn best practices on how employees can use their personal social channels to publish content about your company.

Your company should decide which channels they would like to grow. We find that many clients — especially in the B2B space — want to grow their presence on LinkedIn and Twitter. In our experience, employees are hesitant to share work-related content on Facebook because many of them use it solely to stay connected with family and friends — and that’s okay. 

In today’s current environment where meetups and conferences are no longer an option (at least in the short term), what people are saying about your brand online carries even more weight. Having employees share your company’s message through their social media channels is highly credible and can get that sales prospect to finally make a buying decision. 

If your organization is new to activating employees to share content on social media, you’ll want to take a crawl, walk, run approach. 

Crawl

If your company wants to build its presence on Twitter and LinkedIn, we recommend drafting social posts for each channel and sharing them weekly via Slack or email. You’ll want your copy to vary slightly by channel, and you’ll also want to make it easy for your employees to tweak the language to suit them. For bonus points, you can provide them with a social media tip each week that can help them build their social media knowledge and increase their confidence. 

Walk

After the first month of sending out weekly emails/Slack messages, you’ll begin to notice a pattern of employees who actively share your company’s content each week. Some will copy and paste the suggested posts, and others will copy and tweak the language. 

Both of these groups are employees who recognize that there is some value in sharing content on social media. They should be nurtured. Host a Zoom happy hour or a lunch-and-learn to share more tips and tricks around how they can continue to leverage social media to help share your company’s story. 

Run

Once you’re on a regular cadence of sharing weekly content, consider a session on writing LinkedIn articles. Why move into longer-form content? As John Espirian writes, “ Normal posts in the feed are excellent for visibility, but articles can help sway the minds of decision-makers.” It is this group of people who can engage your service or buy your products. 

For Twitter, show your ambassadors how they can leverage hashtagify.me to check the popularity of the hashtags that they’re choosing to use. 

For ambassadors who are eager to unleash their creativity, have your internal design team create templates they can use to design graphics for their own posts in www.canva.com. 

One of the wonderful things about social media is that it is constantly evolving with new platforms, tools and resources to keep everyone engaged and excited.