Calling all Community Managers! Are you tired of being alone in leveraging the power of social platforms to push your online presence? Sick of being the sole staff member listening to what social media has to say? Are colleagues convinced you’re Superman/woman given your tendencies to save the day on social? If the answer is yes to any of the above, stop right there!

You may be a one-man vanguard for social media success, but it’s high time offices (everywhere!) harnessed the power of social and got behind your essential endeavor for social media success. Transform your social media strategy from one-man band to brand building bandwagon and begin fostering a social media savvy office in 7 simple steps to success:

1. Drip feed social

A social media savvy in the office isn’t going to originate overnight, but drip feeding social into the daily schedule will see an uptick of social engagement.

Start simply in the office, by asking colleagues to:

• Follow corporate channels: if nothing else, they now have perspective of your position and are up-to-date with the latest company content.
• Share corporate content: as they say, sharing is caring...and getting your colleagues to care about content can immediately influence your social strategy

*TOP TIP* Identify internal influencers (employees with a large social fanbase) and leverage their social influence to promote your brand. 

2. Lead by example

Community Managers: let staff see you for the superstar you are by leading the social media mission. Don’t wait for fellow colleagues to fall at the first hurdle, instead, provide them with a template (4 Ws) for social media success, outlining:

• Which channels they should post on? Outline channels most relevant to your industry.
• When they should post during the day (e.g. am or pm, day, weekend)
• What posts should contain e.g. inbound link to website, @companyname on Twitter, industry-specific hashtags, keywords for SEO purposes, etc.
• Who posts should be targeting? (e.g. CEOs or Students)

Providing an exemplar will prevent you from having any awkward conversations with colleagues about the quality and/or quantity of their posts. What’s more, the setting of a corporate standard for social posting means your social strategy will be unified across the office.

*TOP TIP* How about creating some social media DOs and DONTs posters for your office? This way colleagues are constantly kept informed of best practices when it comes to posting!

3. Get gamifying!

Gamification in the office may sound unsophisticated, but bringing out your colleagues’ competitive streak can often reap the results you need! Creating a social media contest not only encourages cooperation and collaboration among teams, but it creates a culture of competition, with each individual/team striving to succeed on social media. Who said brand advocacy had to be boring?!

*Remember* gamification goes hand-in-hand with incentivization! Give game-playing office gurus the chance to win something wonderful and reward them for posting productivity... experience packages are always a winner!

Here are a few ideas to get you going with gamification:

• Dept vs Dept challenges: the first department to reach 50 social media shares in one week (adapt shares to size of company)
• Sharing content: individuals with most social media shares each week/month
• Followers: individuals or teams with the largest combined follower growth in the month (by %)
• Engagement: a prize for the person with posts with most engagement

4. Encourage industry interest

Encouraging employees to take an interest in industry-specific news can automatically amplify social media success. How? Well, if employees are interested, they are more likely to share their insights with others - simple!

*TOP TIP* How about creating a shared document for employees to post the latest articles that day? That way, the Community Manager can select the best 5 - 10 throughout the day, to post on social networks. This combined effort not only saves time but gets colleagues collaborating like never before!

5. Crowdsourcing is key

They say two heads are better than one, but how about ten heads? Internal crowdsourcing of ideas is crucial for social media success: it provides a great opportunity to get teams talking about social media strategies:

• Host workshops or office breakfasts (complete with croissants, of course) to get colleagues collaborating about social media strategies: discuss quotas, targets, contests, shared documents
• Boost brainstorming of upcoming content by gathering together a cross section of colleagues from different parts of the organisation

*TOP TIP* Use crowdsourcing encounters as an opportunity to share reports and insights with colleagues in other departments. 

6.  Educate employees

Educating employees in a relaxed environment on how to harness social media for their own departmen, is an essential part of the social media mission. One way to go about developing a daily social media schedule is through the assignment of corporate content.

Here’s a department-by-department breakdown for assigning social media posting:

• Marketing: promote thought-leadership content, post about upcoming events, webinars and promotional offers
• Sales team: post about free trials, product demos
• R&D: publish updates about software, product developments
• HR: hiring opportunities, job announcements
• Customer services/consulting team: use social to liaise with clients, push content that helps clients with most common problems/FAQs

7. Promote social sustainability

Emphasise the importance of social media monitoring (SMM) tools for sustainable competitive advantage. Tools such as Digimind Social, can better help business outcomes by:

• Listening to consumer sentiment about your brand
• Monitoring what your competitors and other brands are buzzing about online
• Preempting and quickly acting upon crises

Interested in finding out more about social media monitoring tools and how they can support the Community Manager’s mission for a social media savvy office? Well, See a Live Demo of Digimind Social today and keep your colleagues up to date with what’s trending in the social media sphere.