Using social networking for businesses doesn’t end at just having a Facebook or Twitter account. A social business will engage the entire company, and take advantage of opportunities to advance the company’s internal community and preach valuable social media skills as it grows and evolves. The challenge is getting everyone on board. Here are some suggestions for making your company more social:
1. Provide Interactive Tutorials
Sure, it isn’t exactly easy to motivate everyone to tweet or post consistently when they don’t understand what an @mention or @fb is. By hosting your own interactive tutorials across the company, you have the ability to provide a valuable service to your employers or coworkers both at the office and out.
Get everyone involved by delegating tasks and giving responsibilities to your team members to teach something new to the team. Have them learn the task, give a brief tutorial on it, and have all members practice the task.
2. Make it Fun to Use Twitter
Show your employees how to use a hashtag that they can relate to. For example, follow a funny Twitter commentary while watching an episode of your favorite show. Provide specific examples that demonstrate how Twitter can organize information and news for its followers. It is also important to show them that this can be done for just about any industry. Once they learn the basic tools of social media, they will organically see how they can use Twitter in an effective way.
3. Pinpoint the Influencers Within the Company
More than likely, you have several employees or team members that love social media networking. Whether they are Pinterest fanatics or have their phones synced up to Twitter and tweet their entire weekend, these employees should be recognized internally for their mastery of social media. Therefore the team member with the most active Pinterest or Instagram profile should be responsible for documenting the company’s product launch party or Holiday party.
Once your begin finding ways to highlight and utilize the social media skills of your employees, more team members will follow and chime in. Encourage that the entire team @mention a corporate feed or share a corporate post on Facebook and Google+. This will also benefit the company by generating more traffic and leaving more impressions to create a larger social media presence for the company.
One more thing to mention is that it is important that your internal social media experts’ skills are appreciated by the company. This will then influence these people to naturally start helping and encouraging other team members to do the same.
4. Launch an Engaging Contest for Internal Campaign
After you’ve taught and coached employees the basics and highlighted the company’s influencers, its time to get everyone engaged in some fun! Try setting up a contest, for example, a photo contest on Instagram in which the office votes for the winning photos. Utilize Klout to record everyone’s scores and see how progress was made within the month. Another fun idea is to host a company room on turntable.fm and vote for the company’s best DJ. The contest could be that the winner DJ the next office party.
The key is to be sure to follow up with incentives and recognition to encourage participants and friendly competition.
5. Engage, Engage, Engage!
While you encourage your company to become more social media savvy, be sure to cultivate a sense of community. Its true, people want to learn information from social media, but they also want to communicate with one another. A way to do this internally is to occasionally highlight team members’ tweets, posts on Facebook and content on other accounts. Draw attention to those funny and relevant posts and tweets to show employees that they are valued, but also this allows your brand to have authenticity and personality. 
6. Get Creative!
The opportunity to influence social behavior in your company increases with engagement. Create more advanced and focused tutorials, and bring everyone closer by launching new initiatives. Ask your employees what type of contents and initiatives they’d like to see. Make the most of you and your teams’ potential to maximize on social networking, but remember to give credit where its deserved.
Encouraging those who aren’t so savvy or new to the company even might seem very challenging, but by demonstrating the value and expressing enthusiasm, your company will emerge as a social media superstar!
220 Marketing specializes in Online Marketing and Management for industries such as Insurance Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, and Mortgage Marketing.
