Lower employee engagement leads to decreased work productivity. In fact, Axios’s market research indicates that U.S. workers’ enthusiasm at work is now at a 10-year low. If you don’t want to be a part of this statistic, there’s a way—social media!
So, how do you use social media to increase your employees’ engagement levels? That’s what we’ll discuss in this post.
Let’s begin!
What is a Social Media Employee Engagement Strategy?
For modern businesses, it’s important to foster a sense of belonging at the workplace. Every employee wants to feel seen, heard, and valued. An excellent way to ensure this is to use social media for internal communication, collaboration, and feedback.
A proper social media employee engagement strategy uses employee’s access of social media to share their (and the company’s) achievements, thereby boosting morale and brand credibility. It also works for employee advocacy, where you can incentivize your employees to share more posts that create a positive image for the company itself.
Apart from this, employees can be allowed to create content, such as behind-the-scenes videos and workplace culture content that showcases your organization’s culture.
Plus, if upper management and leadership engage with these posts, it creates a more connected internal workforce and gives the outward impression of a great work culture.
Overall, these practices help increase your brand’s credibility and also ensure that the workforce stays motivated, giving their best for the organization even during challenging periods!
The Role of Interactive Videos in Employee Engagement
Interactive videos are the exact opposite of the dull, static engagement videos you often find in most organizations. These videos allow a two-way communication, providing leadership with a method to discuss their goals and intent for the company, while ensuring that employees have a way to provide feedback as well. Here’s how it can work:
Personalized communication through video
Interactive videos can be personalized, and this helps you create videos for employees with different roles, interests, and responsibilities.
For example, you can create a welcoming interactive video for new employees that is customized to their designations. Apart from this, you can motivate high-performing employees with customized videos that celebrate their work achievements or progress.
The interactive videos can also have branching narratives, which allow employees to choose based on their roles and interests. This helps you create video funnels that are tailored for different job roles and gives a personalized touch to each.
Encouraging employee-generated content
We’re well aware of how valuable user generated content (UGC) is today. Fortunately enough, employees can also generate their own content that highlights the company’s achievements, work culture, etc.
For instance, you can encourage long-term employees to create a video talking about their experience working in the company. Another idea could be to host a video challenge where employees submit their best work-related stories. This makes the company seem approachable and enjoyable, especially for new joiners.
9 Effective Employee Engagement Strategies Using Social Media
Here’s how you can turn social media into a brand advocacy tool for your employees:
1. Choosing the Right Platform
Social media platforms don’t work the same way. So it’s important to understand the intent behind each platform. For example, LinkedIn is great for a more professional outlook, while TikTok can be used for a young company with millennials and Gen-Z as the employees and target audiences.
So, choose your platform wisely, as it will set the tone for your future video funnels.
2. Sharing Employee-centric Content
Make employees the heart of all your social media operations. Highlight their success stories, shoot behind-the-scenes videos, give virtual office tours with different teams—the list is endless!
However, the main idea behind this is to showcase to the online world that your employees enjoy working at your organization. The more you talk about them, the more approachable and friendly your brand will seem to prospective candidates. This will also help you get the right talent on board!
3. Using Surveys to Gather Insights
The mark of great leadership is having the humility to take feedback from their employees, as many can have important insights to help grow the company’s revenue. So, create interactive videos with elements like forms and polls, which allow employees to give their feedback.
This will give you valuable insight into the morale of your workforce and how you can improve operations.
4. Supporting Employees in Content Creation
Your employees will create better content if you can support them. So, provide workshops on personal branding, create SOPs for social media content creation that’s based on the organization, and share the content that suits you best!
5. Featuring Employee Insights and Opinions
Use your employees’ industry expertise and showcase it on social media, either by letting them take over the company’s LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok accounts. You can also create interactive videos and live sessions where they answer questions about the company and their work experience.
6. Recognizing Employees on Social Media
For an exceptional morale boost, recognize your employee’s work achievements on social media. From work anniversaries to employee of the month awards, include and applaud them for their work.
7. Involving Employees in Company Updates
Engage your employees in the company’s updates by allowing them to engage with company leadership. You can also provide them with teasers and updates regarding major announcements, and hold interactive CEO town hall sessions to get their feedback.
8. Running Polls and Contests
If you add gamification elements to your videos, you’ll see an excellent uptick in engagement. Add polls, quizzes, and different types of contests to your videos that engage employees and bring out their competitive side.
9. Using Social Walls in Events
Live social walls are a great way to get your corporate event to trend on social media. The wall can include live, real-time updates from employees, and employees can use a single corporate hashtag to get things going. Use these social walls for retreats, town halls, and more!
How Life Inside Helps You Measure the Impact of Social Media Engagement
While you can always track your social media engagement through Likes, Comments, Shares, Subscribes, and whatnot, try Life Inside to truly understand your engagement metrics. If you’re using interactive videos (and you should) for your video creation, Life Inside’s analytics capabilities help you measure engagement metrics of the video itself.
You can measure engagement rates, drop-offs, interaction points, conversions, and so much more! This helps you understand where and why your videos are working, and why some of them aren’t. This way, you can personalize the content in further social media campaigns across your workplace for better employee engagement.
Plus, the in-house team at Life Inside ensures that your videos are collected and distributed with immaculate ease across all your social media channels. This helps you be active from day one!
Apart from that, Life Inside’s platform integrates seamlessly with your current tech stack. This means that you don’t have to invest more money in other third-party apps.
So, go ahead and sign up for Life Inside. You’ll never know how easy social media employee engagement is until you try our platform!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can social media improve workplace culture?
Social media makes employees feel more connected with each other and with the leadership at large. It fosters collaboration and better communication!
2. How does interactive video enhance internal communication?
With interactive video, you can add polls and forms that employees can fill up to give their feedback and opinion. This helps you streamline internal communication and reduce the gap between employees and management.
3. How can businesses encourage employees to participate in social media initiatives?
Businesses can incentivise employees to share their stories and experience at the company. Plus, if you host contests and quizzes, you can appeal to their competitive side for attractive rewards!
4. How can companies measure the effectiveness of social media engagement?
Companies can measure metrics like Comments, Likes, Shares, Subscribes, engagement rates, drop-offs, interaction rates, and more to understand if their social media engagement is successful.
5. What role does leadership play in fostering engagement through social media?
Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering engagement through social media. If they interact with employee posts and share employee achievements, it reduces the communication gap between them and the workforce. It also makes the internal team look more connected!
6. How can employee-generated content strengthen an organization’s brand?
Employee-generated content, such as behind-the-scenes videos, “a day in the life” videos, success stories, and work experiences, helps build trust among new joiners and prospective clients. It not only highlights the brand’s work culture, but also attracts top talent!
