How to Engage Your Whole Team for Social Media Success


September 30, 2013

team social media

Are you ready to lead your organization’s social media marketing efforts? As part of this, you get to update Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. You also get to create lots of engaging content in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts. If your workload is bowing under the weight of these new tasks, don’t worry. You don’t have to go it alone.

Depending on the focus of your organization’s social media efforts — branding, community building, market research, customer service, and leads/sales — other team members can assist you in many ways. Let’s take a look at how you can leverage some team members outside of the marketing department to support your social media and content marketing efforts.

The Founder or Longtime Employees

As social media is a newer discipline, it’s often staffed by younger team members who aren’t as steeped in your brand’s history. Right this wrong by making sure the founder shares her story. Your brand’s creation story alone could fuel a series of blog posts or a few months of #ThrowbackThursdays on Twitter.

Even if your founder isn’t available, take advantage of other veterans in your organization. The next time they tell a story about “the good old days,” consider taking notes instead of tuning them out.

Customer Service and Sales

In many cases, no one knows your customers better than your employees in sales and customer service who talk with them directly. When it comes to social media, we’re encouraged to share customer stories. This always sounds good in theory but is more challenging in practice. Unless you talk to customers every day.

Whether you’re looking for dynamic product testimonials or stories that will tug at heartstrings, empower your customer service and sales teams with mining these gems for you. While this sounds simple, in many cases these team members have never been asked to help or told what it is you need help with.

Product Team

With content marketing, we’re taught to help our customers solve their complex problems with the hopes that ultimately this content will help lead them back to our product or service. This too is easier in theory than in practice.

As marketers, we are masters of the digital domain but our product knowledge isn’t always as deep as our friends a few cubicles over in product development. Get better at taking a walk through other departments or scheduling cross-functional Skype chats or Google Hangouts to better understand how your brand’s product or service is made.

Using this intel, you can create content that takes your customers behind the scenes. You can also offer sneak peeks of new products. Not confident that you’ll get it right? Eliminate human error by taking your iPhone and recording a podcast or shooting a video of you interviewing your subject matter experts.

These team members can offer you a wealth of knowledge but often times can’t readily break these riches up into entrées of digestible content.

Calling All Photographers

We need your pics! On almost every social network, photo posts trump plain text. For brands, this means you need more photos than ever before. Not just sexy product shots but photos of your team, your facilities, your events, your hometown, your customers, and more.

Good thing everyone on your team is a brand photojournalist. Or at least they have the tools (smartphones!) if you remember to ask them. Again, it’s our job as marketers to tell team members what we need.

Perhaps the biggest lesson in getting your team off the bench and engaged in your social media efforts, is letting them know what it is you’re doing and how they can help. In many cases, with an empowered team and clear expectations you can do amazing things together.

Remember, many hands make work light.

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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.