What’s your company’s social media strategy? Are your individual staff members involved? Think about what social media is. What makes it great is the sharing of stories and experiences. For a company to have a great social media strategy they need to empower their staff; and for professional services, the sales staff needs to be empowered on social media to really make your marketing stand out.
As we all know, branding is the compounding of actions, or the sum of all efforts, from all people at a company. The way you talk about your business, and the way other people talk about your business make up all that you are as a brand.
When you empower your staff on social media, it becomes less of a chore and more of an integrated part of your company. Let’s first talk about where to start.
Change the mind-frame about social media
Social media (especially LinkedIn) can be a sales tool. It’s your megaphone to an audience that knows you, and they could be interested in what you have to offer. A ton of people are doing it incorrectly, which is why it can be seen as ineffective. They’re missing the mark with their messaging plain and simple.
Train staff from the jump
Whether you’re in the beginning stages of your company or hiring along the way, make social media empowerment part of your onboarding. Let new hires know the impact social media has to your business, your expectations for them on social media (personally and professionally), give them access to assets you’ve created like logos, images, content, etc., offer reviews of what they are currently doing, and follow up about it. You can’t expect overnight adoption. But, you can make it intertwined in what you do so it becomes second nature over time — which is a great lead-in here.
Make social media a part of the process
Even here at NYB Creative, we make social media part of every weekly meeting. Everyone at the company has their hand in our social media. When Trent is out meeting with clients and local business owners, he uses those opportunities to craft a post that may resonate with others in a similar situation. When our designer, Emily is working through her design process, we capture concepts as they’re being built to tell a unique story. Its become routine to talk about how we can show people a snapshot what we are working on.
Start small with current staff on social media
For most professional services, your logical playground is LinkedIn. Start your staff out with small tasks of bringing their LinkedIn up to best practices.
We’ve written this blog about 4 Tips for Setting Up A LinkedIn Agent Page For Success.
Get everyone on an even playing field. Having a LinkedIn profile that actually says something about you is key to getting engagement. You wouldn’t buy insurance or a home from a mystery person slinking around the internet, would you?
Knowing what to post on social media
Setup is less than half the battle. Shift your mindset on the platform to be engagement-minded and relationship-focused. When you’re crafting your post, think about what you would say to a stranger in a conversation. You may be crafting this message from a conversation you had at the office. Provide the context as to why someone should care. Make it personal. Stand out from the noise by telling a story that resonates with people.
What can cause fatigue with sales staff is not knowing what to post on social media. Here are some helpful tips to keep the ball rolling.
Have you heard of a Social Media Style Guide?
We’d like to introduce you to a social media style guide. Unlike a full brand guide, the application for this is specifically related to the different social media platforms and provides context as to what you should be posting, commenting on, and examples of imagery. Having one of these can provide the field goal posts for your staff to be creative on their own but stay within the basic brand messaging.
You wouldn’t believe how few businesses have one! Want to see ours? Reach out to us on Twitter and let us know it’s something you’d like to see.
Start an internal newsletter
Is your sales staff in the loop about everything you’re doing with marketing? Despite what we initially thought, many of our clients’ sales staff were not aware of many things their company was doing for marketing. Some people were even unaware their blog was frequently updated. We’ve found an easy solution to that is to create a newsletter to internal staff once per week that shares what content is being developed for the company and to share experiences with work. Its helped so much with one of our agency’s that its probably their most looked forward to email.
We look to create more in-depth content in the future about helping your sales staff analyze their individual impact on social media, but this is a great start to getting people on board. Social media is like working out. It’s going to take consistency, evaluation, and optimization. There are going to be times that posts get 0 engagement. Some days you’ll be uninspired and have nothing to post. The point is that you get out there and get involved. Create a focus on building relationships and speaking with empathy. Over time you will find your niche and your vision forward will become clear.
Get the ball rolling today!
