Imagine for a moment that you’re a football coach. If you sent a single-player onto the field, would you expect them to crush the competition?
Of course not.
And social media marketing is no different: If you want to gain traction and beat your competitors online, you need to get your whole team in the game.
Why should social sharing be a “team sport”?
Even if you have a few team members share your blog posts (or other content) on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or other platforms, here are two important reasons to encourage every employee involved in social sharing:
- Social platforms only display your posts in a fraction of your audience’s feeds. You may think you’re “blanketing” your audience with content, but your posts are only being shown to a small percentage of your followers.
- People use social media differently. While some of your audience may be on social sites several times a day, others may check their feeds less frequently and miss your content.
Effective social media marketing is all about sharing content.
When every employee consistently shares your content (when and where your audience hangs out), you:
- Improve your organic reach and exposure.
- Drive more traffic from social media to your site.
- Ultimately, increase your opportunities for sales.
How can you get your whole team involved in social sharing?
If your business is like most, every employee already has a full plate. Here are a few tips to increase participation company-wide:
- Get buy-in. For any marketing initiative to be effective, you need buy-in from owners to managers to entry-level employees. Create a clear plan, explain what your company stands to gain, and be sure everyone knows what’s expected from them.
- Build your networks. Ask everyone – from owners to managers to entry-level employees – to commit to building their social networks (you could even hold an internal contest to make the process fun). More people sharing more content to bigger networks = more website visits and conversions, as well as a stronger brand.
- Engage with your own content. When you post content to your company pages, ask your employees to like, share, retweet and/or comment. Search engines and social media platforms favor content with high engagement – helping to improve both your ranking and visibility.
- Share the right things to drive people back to your website. The real focus of social media activity is to get people from those platforms back to your website. If everybody on your team only shares articles from other websites, you are only doing a great job helping those other sites (and not driving traffic to your own). You have experts throughout your company, so tap your team’s expertise to write posts, articles, infographics or other types of content.
- Automate social sharing. Tools like HootSuite, Buffer and NetSocial allow you to schedule content to be automatically posted to your social accounts. NetSocial streamlines the process even further, allowing you to automate sharing through the social accounts of all the people in your organization.
Need help developing or executing a social strategy?
Investing in a strong social media strategy is no longer a luxury; it’s a business necessity. If you have questions about what your business should be doing, or need help with any part of the process, contact BARQAR’s social media experts today!
