Chris Andrew, managing director UK and Europe at Hearsay Social, urges brands to empower their employees to maximise the effectiveness of all social activity
Every business is on social media, even if they don’t realise it. While they might not have a corporate profile on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, their employees certainly have presences and so will its customers. These social profiles are an immensely valuable asset, as research has shown that sales reps on social generate between 11 – 23 per cent more sales than non-social salespeople. Yet the ubiquity and visibility of online life makes it a medium fraught with potential dangers.
Inappropriate, irrelevant or even illegal content on staff social media profiles could damage a brand just as easily as if it appeared on the company’s own channels. A business has as many shop windows as it has employees – indeed, several times as many, given the number of widely-used social platforms.
There can be a temptation to exert authoritarian levels of control over employees’ personal and business online profiles, but this would be to misunderstand the nature and power of social media. People, and search engines, are hungry for new content. Static pages quickly lose ranking points with Google, while out-of-date thoughts, opinions, links and other content provide little interest for visitors.
Content that is corporately acceptable but otherwise bland does nothing to attract more customers to an organisation, and may well put them off. That’s why it’s vital that businesses ensure their field representatives are not just safe on social, but also interesting and relevant. Ideally, employees’ social profiles should position their owners as experts in their field, providing informed and relevant information on the latest issues and trends affecting their industry and their customers’ businesses.
Establishing an effective social business strategy
The first thing to do is to establish a policy and programme that addresses employees’ presence on social media for business. This is not about being unduly prescriptive or authoritarian; instead, it should involve a commitment to social media best practices. To maintain effective control over social brand presence, marketing and compliance leaders should partner to:
- Establish a comprehensive social media policy, with clear guidelines not just about prescribed content activity, but also providing advice and encouragement for employees to make the most from social.
Ensure that they have full visibility of all employees’ professional pages and profiles across social channels, and the ability to monitor these profiles effectively to ensure they stay consistent to the brand and its values. This is vital, as all these profiles are essentially ‘shop windows’ to your brand; Furthermore, certain industries, such as financial services, are subject to stringent regulations that dictate how employees represent their company, their products or services online, therefore monitoring staff profiles will be a natural part of an organisation’s regulatory compliance.
- Encourage all employees to build complete professional profile pages, with information tailored to each particular channel. A social presence is a great way to be more findable as well as demonstrate industry expertise. Each employee should ask the question: If my ideal prospect stumbled upon my page, does it have the information they would need to inspire and persuade them to work with me?
Power is nothing without responsibility, however, and the next step is to give employees access to a wide variety of content that will enable them to be interesting and relevant online. Again, this is not about prescription; rather, organisations should encourage their staff to contribute, pool and share their own resources to ensure that content is kept current and varied.
- Create a central way to store and share content. This helps ensure organisations can maintain the uniformity of their brand and messaging online, but also helps keep it fresh and up-to-date.
- This content library should include a variety of approved content including articles, images, videos, infographics, and links that can be instantly shared by all employees across their social channels.
- Encourage employees to add their own content to the repository, such as interesting articles, presentations, business pitches – anything that will be helpful to others in the marketing or sales team. With social media, it’s more natural to solicit content from your users than it is for one person to be responsible for finding and providing content.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for a successful social business programme, is measurement. With an increased emphasis on research and networking activities online, sales management must track employees’ social progression through data-driven reviews of their social activities. There are four key areas of measuring the success of social sales activities.
- Findability: social profiles must be completed to the company’s satisfaction including relevant keywords and descriptions. A measurement of the total number of approved profiles compared to the total number of sales reps.
- Network growth: managers should demand to see evidence of month-on-month growth in the number of connections or followers for each field representative across individual network.
- Listening: They must also ensure they evaluate employees’ research activity and response to local buying signals, measured by the number of warm leads that they generated through social media.
- Finally, there is outbound activity to establish credibility: how many posts, of approved content has each employee made each month compared to their goal?
A key reason for social media’s value for business is its ability to mirror traditional offline relationships on the web. The rules of conduct and good behaviour on social networks are nearly identical to those of the offline world, so most people already know how and what they should be communicating; often, it is just a lack of useful tools that prevents them from doing so. By providing salespeople with a library of content that is compelling, relevant, and compliant with company policy, brands will empower their employees to maximise the effectiveness of all social media activity – and reap rewards that include greater visibility, authority and successful sales for their brands.
