Are you looking to boost your brand in the competitive social media market where relevance and engagement are becoming a challenge?
If you are, read on to learn how to use your existing employees to increase organic reach.
If you are new to social media marketing, let us first understand the basics and proceed to the effective steps.
What is organic reach on social media?
Social media platforms use an algorithm that calculates the number of people or account users that see your posts.
Organic reach is the number of individual accounts who view your posts or content without being paid.
Users consciously see your posts through networking sites and social media connections out of curiosity and interest.
In contrast, paid reach includes people who see your posts because of paid promotions and distribution.
Organic reach is a metric that tells content marketers how engaging, relevant, and interesting the product or content is to the viewer. You can get this by counting the number of views, likes, comments, and shares.
Why is organic reach important?
Maximizing organic reach is vital for sustainable growth. Marketers can learn, change, and improve their social media strategies. But this can get challenging because of the declining organic reach in recent years.
According to statistics published by Social Ogilvy, Facebook's organic reach declined to 53% since July 2016, causing content marketers issues.
Five Steps to Use Employees to Boost Organic Reach in Social Media
1. Connect Employees with all Company Social Platforms
Employees are valuable assets to every big or small business and all dynamic companies. Whether you are running a live or online company, your brand's reputation depends on how employees represent you. It also depends on how you deal with the employees as much as you do with the customers.
The trick is to directly involve employees in your social media marketing strategy to improve company sales and reach dynamics.
The first step is to ensure that all your employees have at least one social media account.
Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Whatsapp, tell them to follow your company’s social media account. This will ensure that they see your content in their news feed. If they see it, they are more likely to be engaged and reach others in their network.
Make sure you provide your internal influencers with your company’s handles and direct link for them to find and follow by keeping your account in Public settings.
Also, encourage them to click on “See First” if it is a Facebook page so that your content shows up in their feed every time you post.
Since Facebook algorithm looks for real interactions between users, ask your employees to leave a like or long comment, or even share and tag their friends.
2. Finding and recruiting the right Internal Influencers
Before you start recruiting all the employees as your internal influencers, find out who is most invested in your company's potentials.
Take, for example, DunkinDonut.
It is doing well in their advertising and social media popularity because they use “true life, passionate customer testimonials.” It humanizes the brand and makes it more accessible to common people.
From these chains of customers, DunkinDonut comes across different users who have a large number of audience or followers in one platform or the other.
Identifying your internal influencers:
One way to identify people willing to use their network is by conducting simple surveys. There are online tools like SurveyMonkey that shows you a graph and allows you to personalized questions.
Or, you can also identify and encourage employees by having casual conversations to evaluate their interests.
Whether you are conducting the survey or having a conversation, some of the most important questions you should ask are:
Another effective way to recruit your internal influencers is by featuring them as stakeholders on your social media platforms (after asking permission and privacy protocols).
Celebrating your employees on your channel will flatter and encourage them to share with others.
Once you have posted about your employees, you can monitor the performance by checking the video or photo insights and viewer demographics.
Featuring your employees or customers from different locations will also gain you exposure in different areas.
This is especially effective when you want to increase national or international organic reach percentage.
3. Inform About Company Updates and Goals
Most employees and customers like to be associated with a successful brand or company. So make sure that you keep your internal influencers updated about any company's success or achievements. Keep them informed about your business, and don’t be afraid to brag a little once in a while.
It is also important to keep employees informed about the impact of their contribution and not forget to acknowledge their efforts. This step will inspire them to make more meaningful and engaging content.
For example, you can ask them for their input and opinion on small things like picking the most attractive picture.
You can keep them engaged by giving them credit if they are contributing their original posts and asking them to share it.
Asking for their feedback and valuing their opinion is also a great way to inform them about the changes you want to make indirectly. Their feedback could also be of great value if you are looking for new ideas and trends.
The trick is to understand that with different employees, comes different types of people. The more transparent you are with your strategy, the easier it will be for the influencers to share it with potential clients.
4. Sharing your Internal Influencers Content on your social media
One of the most effective ways to engage your internal influencer is by sharing their content on your platform.
They are more likely to have more candid pictures and videos of your company, product, or services than the curate ones.
It humanizes your brand and grasps more attention from real people and puts your brand as a potential icon.
This opportunity will give them a reason to share their accomplishments with their friends and families.
For example, Red Bull features the works of their customers and employees on their web page. They also allow their audience to submit original ads for the company to be featured.
By doing so, not only is Red Bull saving in design creation and advertising, but they are also generating more organic engagement through the contributor's network.
All you have to do is get creative with your content by carefully selecting who and what you feature in the areas of digital marketing.
You can also create shareable employee newsletters to celebrate your internal influencers through WhatsApp and emails by providing links to your platform.
One way to collect content from your employees is by setting up a submission form readily available in Google Forms. Once you set up the form, encourage your audience and influencers to use it by posting on your platform.
The forms should include:
To boost the use of the submission form, you can inform your internal influencers about it in advance.
For example, if you are planning to acknowledge Halloween, New Year, or Thanksgiving in your campaign, ask them to contribute related posts with relevant hashtags or geo-tags.
5. Follow Up with the Employees
You can’t be too dependent on social media algorithm to notify your audience and influencers about all your progress.
So make an effort to personally inform any employee or internal influencer when you post about them. Send them direct links that are easy to access and share.
You can also let them know about their performance so that they are more motivated to participate again or improve on making an impact.
Summary
Employees can be your valuable internal influencers to boost organic reach in social media.
You can identify and recruit them by discovering their interest, networking skills, and influence on social media.
There are different ways to engage your employees to participate in social media marketing.
One is by sharing your strategy and goals, and the other is by acknowledging them in your post, followed by rechecking your contributors and posts.
Conclusion
All in all, social media is a two-way platform that requires quality content for organic engagement.
If you are transparent with your employees, acknowledge their efforts, and follow these steps, your company will surely see a boost in organic reach.
About the Author:
Bill Acholla is a marketing consultant specializing in content marketing. He has a motivation of helping small business owners build their brand through growth hacking strategies. If you need to learn more about his actionable marketing tips, visit his business blog at Billacholla.com
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