Today I spoke at Digital Shoreditch, an event celebrating the creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of London and beyond. I chose to speak about utilising your workforce to gain a larger reach and more credibility in social media. Utilising your social media workforce is a trend that many companies are exploring and are seeing success with.
We’ve all seen the stories of it going wrong, where individuals don’t quite understand the public nature of their updates and put something incredibly inappropriate, which then goes on to damage the reputation of the company that employs them. For example, the PR executive who tweeted before a trip to South Africa in late 2013. She was dismissed from New York-based internet empire InterActive Corp after the tweet went viral.
However, the reach of your employees is huge. Think of all your staff who use Twitter, or who have a LinkedIn profile. Getting them involved could really help to reach brand new audiences, and give your own activity a much-needed boost.
Your social media workforce are your best advocates, as they can genuinely speak about the business in a genuine and honest way. It’s a much more personal level than a billboard campaign or newspaper advert, which people are more likely to take notice of and trust. They can highlight great work you are doing, publicise any initiatives you are running and also what it feels like to work at your company. For example, Ashley works for St John’s Ambulance and recently tweeted about how rewarding it is working for the charity.
The way that most of the social media newsfeeds now work means that the better posts do in terms of engagement (likes, comments, shares & clicks), the more visibility they will get. LinkedIn now arranges posts in the newsfeed depending on how popular they have been, rather in the order of when they were published. This is a point I will come back to shortly.
So how should you get your staff engaged with your social media? Here are 5 ideas:


1. Create a clear and simple policy:
Do you have a social media policy or guidelines for your staff? By formalising this, you can be clear to your employees what is allowed and what should be avoided, how you expect them to act across social media and how to protect themselves. You can also suggest how they can get involved with the company activity to help you meet your goals. Take a look at Social Media Governance to see hundreds of top policies from Tesco, BBC and Adidas. Once your policy is ready, don’t hide it away in the intranet or in a folder somewhere. Remind your staff about the key points, as Dell has done. Put it by the kettle, in the loos or by the printer!