Online marketing is an extremely important aspect of raising brand awareness and seeing business growth and in this digital age a business should understand the value of using social media to create the best results. If you’re a business looking to increase its social media reach and engagement rates, you can look no further than your own in-house employees. The perfect people to share your enthusiasm and create a buzz around your content, with the inside information and a wider network reach.
People often get frustrated with the difficulty on creating enthusiasm on their social channels and engagement can be hard to achieve but with the help of the very people that also love your business, you can start to build the interaction you need and create a better reach of audience.
Ask your employees
The first step in the process is to get your employees or team members on board with your vision. Share with them your objectives in using social media and ask them to follow your social channels. If they follow your profiles, they are more likely to see your content and in turn, engage with it. If they like what they see, they are more likely to interact and share which means that their audience is then in the running for seeing your content also. In just that small step, you are increasing your audience’s reach.
Make it easy for them to follow, share with them your business @handles so they can easily find you. If you’re using Facebook, they can even choose to ‘see first’ so that your content is the first posts they see when viewing their news feed.
Understand the stats
When it comes to reach, personal profiles have 5x more reach than business accounts. And on average a person has approx. 1,090 connections, it makes sense to use employees to help spread the word of your brand.
Your business profiles are not going to get the same amount of traffic as a personal profile so you have genuine reason to ask your team members to help out – after all they want to see you business grow too, right?
Facebook’s algorithm is looking for meaningful engagement, this means proper comments (not one-word answers!), tags and shares. Therefore try to encourage people to give proper answers or comments and to want to share your content, Facebook will recognise these efforts and award you for it.
With 3.5 billion social media users across the globe, you can’t argue that it’s a great resource to use. And this usage is forever increasing. At the moment that figure represents 45% of the world’s population! Recent stats also suggest that on average people are spending around 3 hours a day on their chosen social channels and messaging. You could say that the people are becoming addicted and obsessed with social media, but that goes in the favour of the business looking to promote and get in touch with their audience.
Incorporate your employees
What better way to get your team to engage with the content than to create videos or images that tell their story or feature them. Social media is all about telling a story, sharing what a brand is about and what value it can offer its customers. Therefore a video that talks about behind the scenes, team member intros, what’s going on in the office etc, is always a great step in the right direction and gives your employees an opportunity to want to share your content. If they see themselves online, they’ll want their friends and family to hear about it and this has a ripple on effect; the more their friends will also start to engage and share the content. The more people interacting with your content, the more people it’s going to reach.
Which social platforms should you use?
We love this example from Buffer which shows the popularity of the social channels for businesses
You can see the top channels and compare that to what you already use in your business. But you also need to ask the question: where will you find your audience and which channels do they use, as this should be the starting block of where you focus your marketing efforts. Be where the people are, find the sweet spot of your audience and then ask your employees to help you raise the profile, create the buzz and help build that relationship of trust and longevity.
Find your internal influencers
For larger organisations it may be easier to accomplish this, however whatever size your business there will be people around you who are good social media and have an influential following on their profiles. When you identify these people, use them! Ask them to promote your products, ask them to do a video review of your brand/products/services, use their influence to help boost your engagement.
Social media is full of influencers, you only have to log in to your favourite platform and you’ll see them, but businesses can use the power of micro-influencers just well as the big guns. These people are more personal, approachable and realistic in their genuine love to help a brand. And by looking internally to your own team members or employees you may just have some connections within reach. Don’t be afraid to ask your employees if they have ideas or suggestions too that will bring your social media to life – the more heads to the table, the more ideas and impact you’re going to achieve.
Social media hacks
There are many things that you can do to increase your social media presence and often we don’t realise that there are a whole range of other ways out there that we may not have considered. Try everything that people offer you; we learn from all trials and experiments that we work on and incorporate in our marketing plans. Here’s a great article from Larry Kim over at Mobile Monkey that will help you with your organic social media hacks.
When it comes to raising the profile of your brand, don’t be afraid to speak to as many people as you need to, to engage and interact in conversations that could lead to influential power or to simply state what you need and hope that your team are on board to help you make that happen. Teamwork is always the best direction, together you can make this happen!
If you’re struggling with raising the profile of your brand or need advice on how to take your social media further, our team of content creators would love to help. Contact us today and let’s talk.
In the meantime, why not download our FREE social media checklist to ensure you’re heading in the right direction – don’t forget the basics!
