Todd Kunsman — August 3, 2018 — August 3, 2018
With the fast-paced moving of information on social media platforms, it is easy for your company’s social posts to be missed. Plus, the updating and changing of algorithms (looking at you Facebook) have affected the way content is seen as well.
This means you are potentially losing out on traffic and social sharing of your company’s latest content. Not good.
And whether you want to admit it or not, social media is incredibly important to the success and growth of your company. Social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are not going away anytime soon.
Now, to increase your social traffic, engagement, and leads, your company needs to continue boosting and getting social shares from online audiences.
So if you are looking to increase social sharing at your company and reap the benefits, then the below three tips will be useful. Also, while bigger brands might not have much trouble getting social shares, these tips can still elevate social sharing and drive better results too.
Ready to dive in?
Improve your company content strategy
One of the main reasons your social sharing may be stale or depleting is the lack of good and interesting content. This is usually one of the best places to start.
This can mean quite a few things and may take some research into your company content to see what is going on. But some questions you should be asking:
- Does the content answer our buyers, customers, and prospect needs?
- Is the content insightful, interesting, in-depth? Or is it rehashed information?
- Do we have good visuals? Videos? Do we split up content with bullet points?
- Do we have unique and interesting attention-grabbing headlines? (Not clickbait)
- Does our content strategy include a mix of getting third-party content? (it should)
You could have a bigger content issue if you do not have it mapped to your buyer’s journey and focusing on your ideal audience. But if you do that already, it may simply be a copy issue and lack of creativity that leaves your company content uninteresting to social audiences.
Allow employees to have a voice online
A rapidly growing strategy for increasing social sharing is encouraging employees of all departments to get involved in social media. Typically, this is dubbed “employee advocacy” and many companies are embracing this strategy.
Why is this important? Well, a few stats to share:
- Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source)
- Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels (Source)
- Brand messages are re-shared 24x more frequently when distributed by employees vs a brand (Source)
Yet, if your company is actively getting employees to share online, you want to make sure they do not all sound like robots online. Provide the content for them to share, but encourage them to have their own voice when they share.
Employees should be able to add their own copy or commentary to what they share. Being seen as personable and human will benefit social results and get more people engaged with the content.
Of course, it may sound scary to unleash employees not in the marketing department to post to social media accounts on behalf of your company. But employees do not want to post things that get them in trouble or fired. Your company should provide some simple, yet clear social media policy guidelines.
Educate employees on the benefits of social media sharing
Yet, when it comes to utilizing employees on social, many times they may not understand the benefits to them personally. Everyone has a different level of experience with social media or even full awareness of how it can be beneficial.
While employees sharing on social is helpful to your company (boosts brand, web traffic, leads, social engagement, etc.), this cannot be a one-way street.
For employees, it helps them boost their career growth, helps them be recognized as thought leaders in their space, and helps grow their own personal networks that can benefit them later in their careers.
Need more actionable tips to get employees sharing on social? Here are 6 ways to get all employees active in social media marketing.
Spy on competitors and look at their best content
This is a pretty common tactic, but a lot of times we forget how important this can be for effective content ideas and social sharing. This, of course, does not mean blindly copy what competitors are doing because:
- What works for them is not a guarantee to work for your company
- Plagiarism is never a good look, instead be inspired
- Not all your competitors will be good at social or content
The best step here for your company to take is looking at a handful of competitors social accounts. Where are they posting? How often? What are they posting? What posts seem to have the most shares? Why do you think those posts did well or poorly?
This is simply analyzing their actual accounts and even using a tool like Buzzsumo, which can show any websites best and most shared content. These insights can give you information that can help you pinpoint where your content or social posts are going wrong or inspire you to try new things.
Final Thoughts
When you think about everything your company needs to be doing to keep your pipeline and revenue healthy, social media and social sharing may not come to mind as a top priority.
But with some of the stats above, social media directly impacts and can make all the difference in fueling company revenue. Yet, without improving social sharing, your company content may be losing steam and audiences might not be engaging much anymore.
The above four ways are a step in the right direction to boosting social shares and getting more eyes on your valuable content.
Looking for more? Learn how Dell got 10,000+ employees active on social and boosted social shares, web traffic, and leads.
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