There should be two types of social media shortcut icons on your website, follow and share shortcut icons.
Follow buttons, located on the site header footer or sidebar provide and easy way for website visitors to follow your company on various social media channels they may be on.
Share buttons allow visitors to share the actual post link of the page they visited, directly to their social media feed, for example Twitter or Facebook.
Let’s talk about the Follow buttons first. When you, or we share a link to your business social media page, anyone who follows that page has an opportunity to see that post on their own social media feed. If they feel inclined to share that social post, then all their friends or followers will then see the shared post. This is referral marketing and works the same way ‘word of mouth’ referrals worked before social media came along. So you can see how sharing can spark exponential promotion of your website through that first share.
Now secondly, the ‘share buttons’ on your website are another way promotion happens. When a visitor reads a blog post they think has value, they have the opportunity to share the website post link directly to their own social media feed using the share shortcuts buttons. Unlike sharing (or re-sharing) the social feed post, this share is pointing directly to the website, instead of back to the first social post.
Here’s where you and your team come in…
- All your employees should be following your social channels, the social channels they use themselves, at least. Why? Your company may have 5 employees right up to a few hundred. Imagine if everyone on the team was doing a little to help promote the company, the place they work that provides their income. Why wouldn’t an employee want the company they work for to prosper, that means they prosper, right? Of course. So to summarize, ask your employees to follow your social media ‘business pages’, and then like and/or share posts they see on their feed that your posting.
- Your employees should be visiting the website at least one a week, maybe visit the blog and share a post or page to their favorite social channel using the share links located below the blog posts or service/product pages. Say you have 10 employees doing this and they all have a couple hundred friends who see the post and are reminded that they are working in that field, know someone who could use your services and contact your business because they know someone who works there… Why wouldn’t you want to hire a company where a friend or family member works. Imagine if you had a hundred employees sharing… So to summarize, ask your employees to visit the website, and share a page or post by clicking the share buttons (located at the end of the post or page) to their favorite social media channels.
OK I don’t want to step on any toes, but the business owner and management should be the first ones doing this. People follow leaders so we always need to be thinking of where we’re going, setting an example, and encouraging our team to join the vision and the game plan in achieving set targets.
Any account admins should also make sure they invite all their friends from their personal account on Facebook to ‘like’ their business page on Facebook. Facebook makes it easy for business page admins to invite their friends list within the business page. If you have any management or people in your company that would like to give access to be able to use this feature to easily invite their friends list to the business page, let me know and we can make this happen.
Oh and by the way, likes and loves are OK, but shares create another social link (to your site or social business page) into anther social media account holders feed. This creates an entire new social backlink to your site.
Below I’ve written an email scrape you can copy and paste onto an email, edit it to your own personality, and use to send out to all your employees.
You might also consider promoting this whole concept to your team at your staff meetings or company news letters.
Example:
As part of our recent online promotional efforts, we’d like to ask all employees to visit the company website, locate the social follow icons in the header or footer, and follow your company on any social media your actively on. Please help our company grow by sharing post you see from our pages to your favorite social media feed.
You can also let people know about the company you work for and what we do, by periodically visiting the company website’s product or service pages, and especially the blog, scrolling down on an article you like and clicking a share link and sharing that page directly to your favorite social media feed. The more you help to promote your company, the better the company will do and that means good things for you too. This will also share with your friends a little about what you do. They may ask about the services you and your company provide and provide an opportunity for us both to serve them.
We’re not asking our employees to get spammy, just to help promote the company they work for with pride to their friends and family on social media, the same as they would in person.
If you publish a monthly email to your team, adding the recent blog post link to the email with a note to follow the link, read and then click to share at the bottom is a great way to make it easy for them to share you pages and posts.
