Should You Encourage Employees to Interact More Online to Boost Your Employer Brand?

Your employer brand may be significantly affected by fostering a social workplace and providing your staff with the skills and resources necessary for online sharing. Employer branding and social media go hand in hand in today’s networked business landscape. When a worker is happy and proud to represent a firm, they can’t help but post about it on social media! An employee may easily spread the good word about your business to friends, family, and even the entire public with the touch of a mouse.

Your business may boost employee loyalty and retention while attracting fresh talent pools by supporting favorable social media branding. As people spread positive news and information that establishes them and your company as thought leaders, employee engagement soars. The audience will soon perceive your organization as a group of entertaining, intriguing, and creative individuals rather than a faceless brand!

Ways to Get All Employees Active in Social Media

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 73% of employees anticipate participating in planning at work. Asking employees how the program could operate best for them makes sense if you intend to use social media to increase employee engagement. Across divisions and geographical areas, employees want to exchange a variety of content. To effectively engage your workforce on social media, you must get all your employees active on social media. Here are some ways to get your employees on social media to boost employer brand:

1. Educate Employees About Social Media

Regarding social media and how it can benefit them individually, many people are still unsure. Social media networks and their functionalities are always evolving, making it challenging for certain people to join in without a little prodding. Inform your staff of the purposes of each social media network and the kinds of conversations that typically occur there. Describe the features and sensible rules for each network.

Some of your staff members might never be interested in using these platforms, and that’s okay. Employees don’t have to be active on social media just because the firm wants them to unless their line of work demands it. Employers may, however, ensure that no one misses out on social media’s benefits because they feel it’s too late to join or because they haven’t had a chance to familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of the various social media platforms.

2. Update Employee’s Social Media Profiles 

It’s likely that although they are inactive users themselves, your staff members actively consume social media information. They might keep up with conversations, influencers, and brands they find intriguing, but they don’t want to participate in conversations. One of the causes of this is that their social media profiles are out of date, and even if they would like to change their profile photo or text, they lack the time, motivation, or knowledge to do so.

Host a class where your adept staff members can instruct others on how to enhance their profiles on social media. Everyone should be photographed well, ideally by a pro, and then you should urge people to post these photos on their social media pages. Aligning the social media profile photographs of your employees further strengthens your employer brand by demonstrating the cohesiveness of your business.

3. Create Social Media Policy 

Employees may not be aware of whether company content is intended for external release or not. Employees may want to share content they find on social media or internal platforms, but they may be unsure if doing so will harm their reputation or brand. They might think they don’t know a subject or topic well enough to participate in a discussion about it. What if they post something and it gets backlash or turns out to not be from a trustworthy source after all? Staff members might not know what kind of content to put on which social media site or what to write in their social media message.

Make a social media policy that outlines how you want your staff to act when representing your business on social media. However, a social media policy need not be merely a list of forbidden behaviors. Instead, you may utilize it to motivate your staff to participate in social media. Employees are under less pressure to interact with clients, coworkers, and users inside and outside of their social networks if it is obvious what they should and shouldn’t do. Second, provide your staff with as much content as you can, and let them know you want them to spread it around. 

Employees can access a variety of content in this way without having to worry about breaking any rules, unintentionally disclosing personal information, or otherwise sharing content that might have unintended consequences. Inform your staff on social media privacy, hiring prospects, and handling prospect data they have obtained from social media in addition to your social media policy.

4. Explain the Advantages of Being Online on Social Media 

You can have some employees in this situation that are computer savvy and knowledgeable about the various social media networks. They probably already read about the firm and the sector; they know how to share and participate in debates, but they aren’t on social media. And the main reason they continue to remain disengaged is that they cannot see the advantages of participating in social media, either directly or indirectly. One of the key reasons staff members should use social media is because it provides the ideal platform for them to begin developing and honing their brand and creating openings for thought leadership.

Even if your staff members have no interest in thought leadership or personal branding, being active on social media will still benefit them in terms of expanding their networks, meeting new people, developing their expertise, and opening up career opportunities when they come across interesting contacts.

5. Encourage Employees to Interact Online & Provide Your Content to Share

Congratulations on getting your staff this far, first and foremost! They are now informed and aware of how various social media platforms operate, active on one or more of these sites, and motivated inside to keep up their activities. How can you then encourage staff members to share your content? Since this is a highly important area for employers, don’t worry. Here are some pro tips: 

Step 1: Create Quality Content

This is crucial! Make sure your content is worthwhile, intriguing, engaging, and rich if you want your employees to share it. Your staff members will want to spread the word about your material if they like it. The secret is to create content that benefits the reader first and the firm second, in that order. Your PR and marketing teams should handle the sharing of branded content, like newsletters and corporate news, so don’t rely on your staff to do it. Instead, concentrate on top-of-the-funnel information that your employees and their networks may find useful and provide it to them.

Step 2: Make Your Stuff Shareable  

Make it as simple as you can for your staff to access and distribute your content. Utilizing an internal content portal, where staff members can readily access and exchange company and industry content, is the simplest method to accomplish this. If you don’t feel like joining an internal content hub, consider encouraging your staff to follow your company’s social profile or promote your content via internal newsletters. 

Step 3: Make Sharing More Enjoyable

Share in a fun way! Again, adopting a content platform with an “external sharing” feature will make this much simpler. You can do this by giving points to those whose posts receive the most shares and comments. But once more, be on the lookout for spam; repeat this: quality, not quantity, is what counts in the end.

You can try to track shares and the engagement they generate manually if you don’t have a platform or any other mechanism to do so automatically. If your business is smaller, you might look through your staff member’s social media accounts to determine how much company information they published and the emotions it sparked, but doing so might feel intrusive and take a while.

Step 4: Acknowledge Advocacy  

Share your findings once you determine who the most powerful employees and supporters are! Create a leaderboard or send an email to all employees praising those who are most active. Announcing a monthly or quarterly Top 3 could add a competitive element to employee advocacy and enhance its gamification.

You can also let people know how a particular post affected how well a piece of content performed overall. When workers can see their contributions firsthand, they frequently feel a great sense of accomplishment.

How to Use Employee Engagement in Your Employer Branding Strategy?

Individuals put greater faith in other people than in brands. This is why you should emphasize your staff, not your business! Your best hope for building a powerful employer brand is to have contented, engaged staff. How else can you utilize your workforce as brand advocates for your company? Give your staff a voice and allow them to share their experiences. The top 4 strategies to incorporate employee involvement into your employer branding strategy are as follows: 

1. Include Videos of Employee Testimonials on Your Career Site 

Your employer branding strategy should be focused on your career site. Incorporate employee testimonials on a wonderful career website. Producing quick, high-quality videos is not an insurmountable feat in today’s modern, digital age. It is inexpensive, simple, and enjoyable! Make sure the video production process is enjoyable for your staff. It will manifest!

2. Display Quotes From Your Employees on Your Company’s Social Media Profiles

You can emphasize the most memorable quotes from your employee video testimonials on social media. Use images of your actual staff wherever possible, especially headshots. Despite how tempting it might seem, resist the urge to use stock images. Show off the faces of your actual staff instead. Show off your pride in your current staff to the world (and any prospective prospects)! 

3. Encourage Staff Members to Contribute to the Company Blog

One of the best concepts for your company’s career blog is publishing a blog written by one of your workers. Encourage your staff to express themselves, be imaginative, and exhibit both their personalities and their professional experience and hobbies. Allow them to write on whatever topic they deem relevant and worthwhile. Keep in mind that your prospects want to learn about the personal lives of the prospective coworkers they will spend most of their waking hours with!

4. Create a Program for Employee Referrals 

Employee referral programs will automatically boost your employer’s brand. Employee referral programs are one of the most effective strategies for locating and hiring the best people. Many businesses have reduced hiring time, expense, and quality by establishing systematic employee referral programs. You may demonstrate to your present employees that you respect their feedback and allow them to participate in the hiring process by asking them to suggest excellent prospects from their networks. Be sure to express your gratitude by providing incentives for staff referrals. As a result, you will increase staff retention rates and increase employee engagement.

Should You Encourage Employees to Interact More Online to Boost Your Employer Brand?

Your company branding strategy’s cornerstone is employee engagement and online interactions. Presenting your business as the employer of choice and a fantastic place to work will be impossible if your staff are not content and engaged. Your employer brand is most influenced by what your employees are saying about it. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, when discussing the working conditions at a company, employee voices are three times more credible than the CEO.

This is crucial in today’s digital age of social media and business review websites. Your employer’s brand can be made or broken by company review websites. More than half of online job seekers examine online reviews before deciding to apply for a job, according to a survey by a top job portal. Employee engagement is now a crucial component of every effective employer branding plan in these times. So that’s why you should encourage your employees to interact online.

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Conclusion

Today’s candidates are technologically aware and spend numerous hours daily on various online platforms. They investigate potential employers using social media as well. As a result, organizations that want to draw in top personnel now need to promote their employer brand on social media. The best way to boost an employer’s brand is to encourage employees to interact more online. Employers appear to be acutely aware of that. Research shows that 76% of businesses use social media to promote their employer brands. This is due to the constant usage of social media by younger generations. 

FAQs

1. What is the key to having a strong employer brand?

Deep work, courageous self-inventory, and the development of a few essential attributes are necessary to build a truly healthy, happy employer brand. You can confidently hire, keep, and engage your employees if you put focus on these factors.

2. Should every employee engage online?

You can’t force any employee to interact online, also every employee doesn’t need to be online to boost your employer’s brand. But giving employees an amount of knowledge about social media platforms can help them understand their importance.

3. Why is employee engagement important?

It’s crucial because motivated workers feel appreciated and know that their labor matters. They look forward to going to work, giving it their all, and experiencing professional achievement while also assisting the business and assisting others.