3 Steps to Motivate Your Team to Use Social Media

When a team starts using social media, companies win. Updating personal Twitter accounts, sharing on LinkedIn profiles, writing blog posts, and posting to Facebook makes your employees more visible to your customers and elevates their credibility, helping your brand look great. When they use these channels to share some of your company’s marketing collateral, even better! The problem is that getting teams to use social media is hard. So how do you get them to do it? 

I recently spoke with Maggie Fox (@maggiefox) the CEO of Social Media Group, one of the top social media strategy agencies in the world with clients like 3M, SAP and Ford Motor Company. I mentioned that one of the biggest challenges we saw with our customers was helping them get their team to start publishing for the first time. I started talking about features we provide that make using social media fast and easy, but Maggie focused on something much more important - using social media is about changing behavior. Changing behavior is about motivation. And motivation requires understanding. 

So how you do you motivate employees to use social media? In three steps: Inform, Education, Motivate. 

Inform: Make sure your team is aware of your company’s social media activity. This means putting them on your blog’s mailing list, ensuring they’re all connected to each other on LinkedIn, and following each other on Twitter. You can manually put together an email list or if you’d like, there are other tools out there to help with this. One example is Grow, which you can find at grow.getelevate.com to help your team check if they are connected on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Educate: Your team isn’t likely to start doing anything they don’t understand, so it’s critical they learn about how to use social media. One approach is to create a short explanation of social media or to share one with them. A short presentation on how social media works for professionals can be found here: Why Social Media Matters to Professionals. Another approach is to share a digest of your company’s social media activity with them. This helps them learn about social media by watching how your marketing team and your colleagues use social. You can see an example of how that look below: 

Motivate: Motivation is about showing them the benefits for them. Fortunately, social media has many built in reward mechanisms- new connections, mentions, retweets, comments and likes. People are excited about communication and building new relationships, so every retweet, direct message and new LinkedIn request is exciting. The key again is ensuring they’re informed and educated about social media so this feedback motivates them to increase their social media use. 

So that’s the formula: Inform, Educate, Motivate. If you’re looking for tools to make this easier, don’t forget to check out www.getelevate.com