All oars in the water

If you’re a small company, calling attention to your brand and defining your company’s purpose can be a daunting challenge. Your social media team may also be small not to mention the budget you’ve been provided to champion your company’s cause.

Your hurdle is how to begin planting the seeds of trust with your current and future customers, to call attention that your small company is worth paying attention to and conducting future business. Here’s an idea, word-of-mouth messages from friends and colleagues are almost always better received than blasts from corporate accounts. What I’m saying, is starting with a small social team is not as bad as it may sound.

I know you’re saying you have but a five or seven social media team. However, you have other resources you can tap into…your companies employees. Simply encouraging your employees to share their company’s social media updates–when done properly–can dramatically expand a company’s total following, extending the reach and impact of its messages. Your employees can become powerful marketers, sellers, & recruiters.

Basic math

Still thinking it can’t be done? Let’s say you’re a mid-sized company with a total of 5,000 followers altogether on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Now, let’s say you have 100 employees, each with approximately 250 followers of their own, for a total of 25,000 unique followers. By asking your employees to share messages, you can boost your audience (at least on paper) from 5,000 to 30,000–instantly.

Additional benefits

Enlisting your employees to become social media ambassadors provides other benefits for the company. As you feed your social media pipeline [Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, webinars, etc.] your employees are learning about the current happenings of the company they work for. Learning about their company helps them become a super-engaged workforce and are actually empowered to share the knowledge of what your company represents in terms of value, services, products and more.

This is particularly important today as social media can help spread positive vibes about a brand far and wide, and if these ‘social vibes’ emanate authentically from passionately engaged employees, then it’s a massive win for your organization!

Help from the top

It’s important to point out that none of this works without the right foundation, and that foundation starts with management. Other than your in-house social media organization, enlisting communication support from leadership is needed. Managers, directors, vice presidents, even the CEO, should be actively engaged on social channels. If a company’s senior management is not out there championing the business they’re running, if they’re not leading conversation or generating debate around issues affecting their industry or trends relevant to the company they represent, then why would your employees embrace social media and become unofficial ambassadors for your organization care to get involved?

An added reason for the top executives to get involved is to enhance their knowledge and skill using social media. In short, management needs to learn and understand what the fuss is all about. Learning to know how consumers today are connecting with brands and with each other using social technologies, will educate them to the new consumers of today. Companies need leaders who are not only passionate about social media but also willing to use their social networks and online publishing platforms to create content on behalf of the brand and interact with customers and influencers.

Resources

Now that you have religion how does one begin? What tools are available out there to get started? Below you’ll find a few software programs to investigate: