Your Businesses Social Media Bandwagon - 6 Ways To Motivate Your Employees To Jump On it

1. Train. You need to provide your employees with training on what social media marketing actually is. They need to understand what your goals and objectives are and how you plan on achieving them. Due to social media having a rapidly evolving and changing nature, the best route to take is to hire a consultant or agency to come in and provide these trainings. Employees need to have a good understanding of how social media for business works before they can think of ideas on what they can do to help.

2. Empower. During company meetings, empower employees to think freely and to come up with one idea to expand and build your social networks. This lets employees know that their opinions matter and will be heard. It lets them feel like they are apart of a bigger team and bigger picture other than their job title. Also, when employees feel like they have a voice in the overall direction of a company, loyalty is ultimately formed.

3. Reward. If Sally the receptionist brings a great social media marketing idea to the table, reward her! I guarantee you that once you start doing this, your employees will be more inclined to outwardly speak in a positive way about your business online and will share your presence more frequently to their own online networks.

4. Offer. Ultimately, you will have to designate one, or more, key employees to actually have “social media marketing” in their job description. No tribe works when there are too many chiefs and not enough indians! Offering these key employees incentives for gaining “likes” on a Facebook page or “follows” on a Twitter account is a great way to motivate. The reason why it may not be strategic to offer “everyone” these incentives (for example monetary bonuses) is because you don’t want to skew your demographic. You want to be sure that the “likes” you are capturing are in-line with who your ideal customer is and that they have a legitimate interest in your services or products. (This goes back to it’s better to have 200 likes on a page that will engage with you, than to have 1000 non-engaging likes that could care less about what you have to say.)

5. Objective. This concept has been tested time and time again. It works…period. If you incorporate “idea development” into the quarterly or annual goals of your company…it tends to get done. Show them that when they help your company reach goals that move it in a positive growth direction, their careers are moving in that direction as well. Let your employees understand that by reaching these “goals” everyone wins!

6. Create . Construct a place for employees to ask questions and get answers. Maybe it’s on a company blog or an internal forum. It just needs to be somewhere where they can go and freely ask questions about your social media policy and review company goals, objectives and plans on how to get there.