If you mainly use your social media accounts to promote your landscape company’s service offerings, you could be missing out on a whole other genre of posts.
Social media is intended to foster a sense of community and isn’t just another channel for traditional marketing efforts. Featuring your employees’ stories on your social media accounts can help foster conversations and be a powerful form of brand advocacy.
Not only can social media posts about your team members be used as a form of appreciation, but it can also highlight your company’s culture and attract additional talent. The stories you choose to tell can help differentiate your business and connect you to your audience on an emotional level.
What Stories to Tell
There are a variety of ways you can go about highlighting members of your staff. However, it’s important to first develop an objective with your posts.
Consider your company’s goals with these stories and how they tie into the business’s priorities. Are you trying to foster more trust with your clients? Or are you trying to emphasize the way your organization is a destination employer? This can help fine-tune what type of social media posts to make and where to post them.
Also, think about areas of the company that are important but lack representation. Employee stories can help with this visibility. For instance, you could feature individuals who embody your company values or show their career growth within your organization.
One possible employee story post option is allowing a team member to do a social media takeover. This is where an employee can post for his or herself on your channels or do an interactive chat or livestream. It’s best to have your featured employee collaborate with your marketing team on posting guidelines to ensure boundaries aren’t crossed.
Another option is posting to coordinate with various theme days. For instance, International Women’s Day is March 8 and can be an opportunity for you to post about your female employees and ask them what they love most about working in the industry.
You can also post about your employees enjoying your various company events, participating in volunteer work, or their own interests beyond the workplace.
Best Practices
The first thing when it comes to sharing employee stories is ensuring you have obtained their consent before posting their story, photos or videos. Make sure they understand how and where you will be sharing about them.
While some individuals appreciate this form of appreciation, others may prefer not to be put in the limelight this way. Also, if you are writing employee spotlight posts, be sensitive to what information is shared. For instance, you may have an individual with your company who overcame some significant hardships and you want to celebrate how far they’ve come.
Depending on the person, this could infringe on their privacy or make them uncomfortable, so always check on what they’re okay with sharing publicly.
You might have some employees who come to mind who you want to feature, but it’s important to make it clear that everyone has a chance to participate. Everyone has a story and you don’t want to leave anyone out.
When telling these stories, try not to overedit or censor your employees. Allowing their voice and personality to come through will help these posts be more authentic and relatable.
Whichever style of employee posts you decide to make, monitor success metrics such as engagement with these stories so you can make improvements or feature similar stories. Other indicators of employee stories making an impact include increased brand awareness and your talent pipeline becoming faster and easier.
Increase Engagement
If you’ve posted employee-related content on your social media accounts in the past and had them perform poorly, this may be because you didn’t utilize the right strategies to promote engagement.
Asking questions on the post can help encourage your audience to leave comments or share some of their own experiences. If you receive comments, make sure you take the time to respond to these to keep the conversation going.
You can also encourage your team members to reshare company posts to help them reach an even wider audience.
Also, review your posts to ensure they come across as genuine versus insincere and robotic.
