Activating employees for brand building.

While your company’s social media channels are an important way to connect with your target audience, build brand awareness and increase sales, your employees’ social networks are typically an untapped avenue to build valuable brand visibility. Known as employee activation, this social strategy uses the influence of your employees to promote your company through their personal social media networks.

What is employee activation on social media?

Employee activation encourages employees to share out company information, including specific products or campaigns, company news, job postings or industry news on their personal social media channels.

What are the benefits?

• Extend your company’s social media reach by tapping into the audiences of your employees.
• Keep your employees engaged, connected and informed.
• Help employees boost their social presence with industry-specific news and information.

Before you implement an employee-activation program, here are four important reminders to ensure success:

Have a social media policy

Guidelines are important to protecting your company’s reputation and ensure professionalism when employees are referring to work on their social media channels. That’s why a good social media policy describes what is appropriate and not appropriate for employees to post about their employer. If you don’t already have one in place, Bader Rutter can help you establish guidelines specific to your industry and company needs.

Do not force employees to participate

Encourage employees to partake in internal social media activation, but do not require employees to share content on their personal social media accounts.

Create valuable resources

Set your employees up for success by giving them the information and resources they need to share about your brand by creating a content library. Content should include a mix of industry articles, relevant news and company-related content. You also can provide employees with suggested copy to promote ease of sharing.

Utilize an employee-advocacy platform

A popular employee-advocacy tool used by several Bader Rutter clients is Amplify. Hootsuite’s Amplify platform allows companies to create preapproved content for employees to easily share with a couple of clicks. This helps ensure messaging is accurate, clear and on-brand.