Are you still using the traditional methods of employee engagement, like a team lunch or a quarterly townhall? News flash: these methods are outdated and no longer effective. Your employees want to be seen, heard, and respected.
So what can you do to ensure this? Why, implement social media for engagement, of course!
Social media is a potent tool that can give your employees a sense of belonging. It opens up two-way communication between employees and upper management, keeping your workforce in the loop and involved.
And this isn’t just us saying it. Here are a few stats from reliable sources that provide social media’s importance for modern-day workforce engagement:
- Organizations with engaged employees are 24% more profitable
- Engaged employees are 44% more productive than non-engaged peers
- Disengaged employees can cost your organization up to $500 billion per year
These statistics highlight the importance of an engaged workforce. So, to help you out, we’ll discuss everything that you need to know about social media employee engagement in this post!
Why Social Media Employee Engagement Matters
In this section, we’ll explain why social media employee engagement is crucial for long-term growth.
Boosts Workplace Culture and Morale
Your employees work hard not just for the salary, but also for recognition. Timely appreciation of their progress or wins helps you keep employees motivated and inspired. Plus, if you’re publicly acknowledging their contribution, it provides an incentive for others to work dedicatedly for their dues as well.
You can appreciate them on private internal channels like Slack, or talk about their achievements on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.
And it’s not just about recognition either. Your employees want their feedback to be heard. Opening up the floor to ideas from every employee, whether interns or senior management, creates a sense of shared unity and encourages collaboration.
Strengthens Employee Advocacy
No matter how many videos or ads you put out about your organization’s work culture, amenities, and perks, your employees are your most effective brand ambassadors. Potential candidates often reach out to present or ex-employees to understand the behind-the-scenes processes involved in different departments.
If you want positive reviews, keeping your employees engaged, motivated, inspired, and productive will help you attract top talent for future openings.
That’s not all—when employees post about a great work culture on social media sites like LinkedIn, you receive much better organic reach and engagement than branded content. In fact, you receive 8x more engagement!
So, your employee engagement program can become your best employee advocacy tool, but only if your employees are satisfied.
Enhances Internal Communication
While this pertains less to just social media and more towards employee engagement in general, engaged and motivated employees often take initiatives to smoothen communication pipelines. For example, if you’re using Slack or email blasts, employees can collaborate across departments and provide instant updates.
This promotes transparency and accountability—not just in a single department, but across the organization as a whole.
It also reduces the burden of going through multiple threaded emails, which can be confusing and burdensome in long-term projects.
Best Social Media Platforms for Employee Engagement
Now that you know about the benefits of social media employee engagement, let’s understand how the different social media platforms available today can be used to connect with your employees.
LinkedIn - Professional Networking and Thought Leadership
LinkedIn is great for your organization’s professional outlook. You can use it for sharing industry insights, promoting employees through their achievements, and sharing updates on your organization.
While the tone is professional, LinkedIn is great for networking and connecting with external sources who can be assets to the company’s image. You can establish your employees as experts in their domains, elevating your chances of inbound leads.
Of course, since you’re promoting your employees, their recognition serves as a great motivator for efficient and productive work.
But we’d recommend you to set guidelines on what can be talked about regarding the company’s work culture and projects. Let your employees maintain their creative freedom while respecting the organization’s boundaries.
Facebook Workplace - Dedicated Collaboration Hub
While Facebook Workplace isn’t that widely used, it’s still a great platform for employee engagement. It’s a familiar platform for most, which makes adoption much easier and streamlined.
The platform also allows you to interact across departments, host live video calls, and provide regular updates on the company’s progress. You can also put up recognition posts for those employees who deserve their laurels!
Slack and Microsoft Teams - Real-time Engagement
Slack is one of the most widely used collaboration tools today. It allows you to send messages in real-time, upload documents, images, and videos. Also, you can have video and audio calls in real-time!
Microsoft Teams also provides internal communication features with video and audio calls, and real-time updates.
Overall, these tools are great for keeping up with quick changes in the organization’s approach, discussing challenges, and taking feedback from your employees.
Instagram and TikTok - Creative and Fun Engagement
Compared to the other tools on this list, Instagram and TikTok bring a more informal tone to social media engagement. They’re great for posting behind-the-scenes updates and team outings.
You can also ask your employees to create their own content for the brand on relevant topics, fostering a sense of creative freedom. This enables your employees to not just engage with their peers, but also with people outside the organization, making a strong case for employee advocacy!
Effective Strategies to Boost Engagement
Here’s how you can boost employee engagement using social media:
Encourage -Generated Content (ECG)
Ask your employees to create their own videos citing their experience of working at the organization. You can also give them templates like “Why I love working here” or “my favorite amenity/perk”.
This is great for organically boosting the organization’s reach, cultivating authenticity. It also gives employees a chance to speak their mind and be recognized as one of the company’s faces!
Host Social Media Takeovers
Social media takeovers are a popular trend where a person or group “takes over” somebody else’s social media accounts. In this case, you can make employees take over the organization’s LinkedIn and Instagram accounts for a day and post everything based on their lens of the workplace.
They can showcase behind-the-scenes moments, highlight the office amenities, show a “day in the life” of different department workers, and more. This gives a lighthearted, fun vibe to your audience and is highly attractive for potential candidates.
Recognize and Reward Employees Publicly
While we’ve already talked about recognizing your employees’ hard work and rewarding them with incentives, it bears a mention here as well. When you celebrate an employee’s win with the entire team, it makes them feel seen and appreciated.
This also incentivizes other employees to be more productive and efficient, in pursuit of similar rewards and recognition. Basically, not only does it validate your employees, but it also instills a spirit of competition.
Gamify Engagement with Challenges
Speaking of competitive spirits, you can gamify your employee engagement techniques with interactive game elements like quizzes and task-based rounds. Check scores over time and maintain a leaderboard for a week or month.
Give incentives to your workers after reaching certain milestones, and reward the winner at the end of the competition. This is great for workplace motivation and recognition.
Live Videos and AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
If you want to make your employees feel more connected to the workplace, you’ll have to provide two-way communication between them and upper management. This is best done through Live Videos or AMAs, where employees can ideate and provide feedback to upper management on policies, tools, ethics, etc.
This maintains a sense of transparency in the workplace and can also be repurposed into internal knowledge content!
Leveraging Interactive Marketing Platforms for Engagement
Interactive Marketing or Interactive Video Marketing is a form of marketing that changes the viewer’s method of interaction with the content. Interactive video, for example, allows viewers to choose their own narrative and progress through the product or brand’s story.
As a result, these videos are much more engaging than traditional videos, which we can only watch and observe.
This is why interactive marketing platforms like Life Inside can be excellent for engagement. You can create different types of interactive videos by selecting interactive video templates for Live Videos, Product Demos, Employee Engagement (through polls, forms, surveys), and more.
Of course, you can also add gamified elements to the videos for more interaction possibilities. These videos are great for employee engagement because of high participation levels, better retention (especially during onboarding), and their ability to create an emotional connection through storytelling campaigns!
Measuring Social Media Employee Engagement Success
Creating employee engagement campaigns is great, but to truly know if they’re working, you’ll have to measure certain metrics.
- Participation Rates: Check how many of your employees are participating and engaging with the campaign content. They could attend the live sessions and share posts.
- Shares/Comments: Engagement is also noticed through post shares and the number of comments. Instead of just Likes, Shares and Comments give a more meaningful interaction signal.
- Employee Net Promoter Score: Run an internal survey that shows how many employees would recommend your company to other potential candidates. Always track this based on pre- and post-campaign seasons.
- Here are the tools that you can use to monitor the campaign performance metrics:
- Google Analytics: Measure the traffic your internal portal or website is getting through the social media campaign posts.
- Hootsuite: Aggregate all your engagement metrics from different social media channels.
- LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok: You can get insights on views, clicks, accounts reached, and more through the native analytics suites present in these platforms.
You can also provide surveys and forms to gauge engagement. Of course, they’d have to be anonymous to protect your employees’ privacy. Also, ask questions about the type of content they’d like to see, or if minority groups are represented enough in the content.
After acquiring this data, measure it against future campaigns and their responses to optimize for higher engagement.
Common Challenges and Solutions
Let’s check out the solutions to some of the most common challenges that you may face during your social media employee engagement campaign.
Low Participation: No matter how impeccably designed your campaign is, it may still lead to low participation from employees. The best way to avoid this is to start with campaigns that require minimal participation effort from employees, such as a poll or tagging colleagues in relatable memes.
Being Insensitive: When you’re creating employee engagement content or encouraging your employees to do so, there’s a fear of offending certain people or groups. Ensure that before the campaign starts, there’s a set of rules to follow. The rules should not be about censorship, but should be positive and allow creativity without hurting sentiments.
Brand Voice Inconsistency: If you’re targeting multiple social media channels, it’s important to have a consistent voice. For this, establish guidelines to adhere to brand voice without stifling creative freedom.
Platform Fatigue: Don’t focus on multiple channels at once, as this can overwhelm employees. Start with 1-2 targeted channels for engagement, such as LinkedIn. This will help set a healthy boundary, which allows employees to interact with the campaign content without spilling over onto their personal social media accounts.
How Life Inside Can Help With Social Media Employee Engagement
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that helps you create, collate, and automate the distribution of interactive videos. Its intuitive dashboard and tools help you create interactive videos that are primed for social media employee engagement. This includes polls, quizzes, Live Videos, and surveys that you can add to the video for employee interaction.
You can also check the performance of your videos with Life Inside’s analytics, which lets you monitor watch times, engagement rates, and more. Moreover, the platform is lightweight and easy to integrate with your marketing tech stack.
Life Inside’s in-house content team can also help you set up the platform and collect previous videos (such as employee testimonials) and prepare them for deployment on your social media channels.
Sign up for Life Inside today to find out how you can establish two-way communication in your organization to make your employees feel heard, seen, and appreciated!
Frequently Asked Questions:
1. What are the risks of using social media for engagement?
Without clear guidelines and content moderation, social media can be difficult to use for engagement. It might misrepresent the brand’s image or lead to employee harassment.
2. How can remote teams stay engaged via social media?
Remote teams can remain connected and engaged via social media through text posts, videos (live, static, interactive), and gamified social media content.
3. Should employees use personal or company accounts?
Employees should ideally use company accounts to be tagged on company posts. Personal accounts can be used if they are organically talking about the company. However, it has to be limited to minimize the risks of online abuse.
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