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Most, if not all, of your team will have social media accounts. What if you could get all of your team to like and share your business’s social media posts?

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and many more social media platforms are driving customer decisions. Messages and posts that come from friends and colleagues tend to be considered more trustworthy than something from a faceless corporate account. If your team members share updates and messages with their own social media networks, there is an opportunity for your business to build brand awareness and trust with a whole new audience.

The numbers tend to make a compelling argument. Let’s say your busienss has 1,000 followers on LinkedIn and a team of 50. If each of your team had 100 connections on LinkedIn, and they all liked, shared and commented on your business’s posts, your social media marketing reach would go from 1,000 potential views to 6,000.

In order to achieve this level of social media engagement, your employees must want to share your content. You can’t make them do it. If your people are engaged and enthusiastic, then helping the company get the word out, via social media isn’t a huge ask. At the same time, by sharing relevant messages, employees can ideally build their own profile. This can help them to build their reputation in their professional network.

You should also consider your target audience. Every member of your team may not necessarily have social media contacts that are interested in your product or service offering. For example, if your business sells mining equipment, then there is no point in reaching out to people who work in the food-manufacturing sector. It may be useful to build a profile of your ideal target audience. Then consider who in your team has a network that matches that profile. You can then set about encouraging those team members to engage with your social media content and share it with their own networks.

In order to get the most out of your team and their social media engagement, you should create some in-house training and some guidelines, which explain how you would like your people to talk about your brand on social media. You should also use your social media advocates sparingly. If you bombard your team members with too many requests, they are likely to become a bit fed-up and will disengage.

In order to get the most out of your team social media campaigns, you should assign someone with an appropriate skill set to create social media messages for the business and then make it easy for your team to like, share and post those message on their social media accounts. The easier you make this process, the more likely you are to be successful.

Finally, think about how you reward those who engage the most with your social media campaigns. For example, you could have a monthly award of a bottle of champagne for the person who gets the most social media hits for the business.