We all are aware that how social media has become one of the important aspects of life and not to forget the growing demand of internet globally, people has actually started spending their most of the time on social media sites and after the advent of smart phones the number of people and the time spent on social media has increased drastically.
On the other side, social media is helping people in news consumptions, connecting with people, exploring more about life, health, trends, getting in touch with the product selling companies for support & assistance, finding jobs, creating image, brand building & many more.
In the midst of ongoing COVID19, social media is playing the significant role for individuals and groups to stay in touch even after physically separated. We all are aware about the current pandemic situation of the world and we saw how people took advantage of social media being far away from their closed ones in the complete lockdown globally. Even people are getting the right update about the inclining graph of Covid19 cases and let’s not forget the mental health support where everyone is joining hands together to help those who lost their jobs due to impact by sharing their job needs & requirements.
#sharingforbetterreach, #commentingforbetterreach,#washhands #covid19 are the most popular hashtag presently and trending in all over social media platforms.
According to the financeonline.com, before covid, In 2019, there were around 3.484 billion social media users in the world & if the usage continues to increase the estimated forecast could be more than four billion social media users by the year 2021.
Given above is the data of social media users between 2010-2019 by Statista, Data Reportal & eMarketer which shows the increasing rate of users with the years.
According to the latest report of 2020 by Statista, nearly 50% of the world population uses social media that is equals to 3 billion users worldwide. And among them 74% of users check their Facebook daily around 8 times each day & 96% users are using Facebook on mobile with 500 million daily viewers on Facebook stories alone. (Pew research centre, SmartInsights, Statista, Techcrunch)
According to Statista, twitter has more than 330 million monthly active users, Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users and among them 500 million uses this platform on the daily basis.
According to LinkedIn, their platform has more than 690 million active users.
And after all this, most organizations have started understanding the value of brand building and engaging in social media marketing & with the data like above, it is totally understandable that how social media is playing decisive role in adapting digital marketing strategies for the growth of the companies.
And employee engagement on social media is the next big strategy, many companies are doing and taking benefits in growths and success by creating better social media presence online.
Organizations are understanding, it’s not always about the product or service, it’s also about the trust which is only built when users see their brand or company talking about their employees & also when the employees talk about their current position, teamwork, support & assistance of the company, the fun culture, their feedbacks, their regular official communications. With increase in daily day to day office life on social media, there’s a high chance that the reach and presence will increase.
But due to strict office protocols of not using phones, it is impacting the company to reach globally. Previously it has been seen that employees use to post any of the office happenings on social media, that was taken strictly to maintain the office secrecy and data, so that’s the reason and the example set earlier take few employees in dilemma that whether they can share these photos of official adventures or trips etc or not.
An employee usually has more than 500+ growing connections on LinkedIn/Facebook or any other social media platform with double reach and connections of your competitors, clients, customers, corporates etc & when an employee shares or comments or like any of your business page posts, that can be seen in the newsfeed of all their connections which are likely to convert into followers of your page and even business leads.
This is also known as Employee advocacy where strategically employees are used to promote the organization organically. This is the powerful medium to extend the reach in comparison to inorganic marketing (Paid media)
According to the Hootsuite, employee advocacy are benefiting many companies with a positive impact in growth and sales because of the brand awareness and positive perceptions along with the improvement in staff recruitment, retention, engagement and it is also helping brand to improve the reputation and issue management.
Employee rebranding is really important to understand for every growing companies despite of being in any sector or field. Your employee social media profile, (majorly LinkedIn) is the key of your growth too.
From the profile pic to cover page of the employee’s profile decides your company image if he/she has tagged your company as their current employer.
Because when they share any random posts on the platforms, there’s high chance the connections visit the profile if they find the post interesting which also leads to check the employers page also. So building employee image is also very important to achieve the desired targets.
Let’s take an another case, where your company is looking for leads and your employees are working hard in reaching every company, sending inmails, messages but they haven’t been active much on social media platform in making connections, sharing posts, liking or comment which makes the activity list empty and when the interested client or company visits the profile they find the employee suspicious and here you lose the lead.
So giving trainings on their virtual identity, making them understand about the social media policies is really very important because many of the employees don’t even know about this, maybe because of their previous employers. So, during induction, this can be added to make them understand about the certain rules and guidelines of online presence and fun activities by also clarifying the point of excessive usage of mobile phones during work in the name of social media engagement.
According to the study, if an employee shares their company’s revenue growth, market stability, media coverage posts, success & awards, support & assistance, job posts, there is a higher chance to increase the visibility among the aspiring candidates looking for job, clients looking for business, competitors to take example and associations to see the growth of the company on LinkedIn.
The random page views, profile views, following related pages, sending connections of employees also make the company visibility on excellence.
Encouraging employees to share their random moments of daily office life really helps your consumers to understand that there’s human hidden behind their favorite company and it’s not all machine.
The company also have to take care that employees are working for them but imposing to participate on social media posts can lead to bad experiences of employees.
This can also be done by gamifying the social media experience of employees. The key metrics can be created to keep a track on Top contributors on social media, maximum shares/likes/comments on posts & how many people are viewing on the posts shared by your employees, maximum traffic bought by employees, sharing random photos of work and experiences etc.
The reward and recognition can be kept for top participants on weekly or monthly basis and the reward could be anything from movie tickets to paid lunch or on site visits or leave/half day, trophies etc by keeping healthy and friendly competitions which will definitely drive your employees to engage more.
Employers need to understand and make this clear to avoid miscommunication and negative feedback behind their back that these employee engagement & advocacy is the employees part of work, not their another job duty which usually happens and that’s the reason they avoid engaging on social media.
To conclude, more than 90% of brands are on social media and use various marketing tools to engage with their target customers. Many companies are understanding their asset i.e. employees and using them to build their brand and image for better outreach & visibility.
What do you think as an employee or entrepreneur or as a reader? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
