Social Media Provides a Major Resource for Engaging Employees

Most savvy businesses have discovered the power of social media and use it regularly to communicate with and engage their customers.  But what many don’t understand is how valuable these tools are for engaging employees, offering the perfect forum to build morale and get workers involved in company promotion.

Whether a business uses LinkedIn, Twitter (News - Alert), Facebook or another application, these tools are a great way to help employees feel valued while enabling them to contribute to your company’s broader vision. Employee engagement is critical to business success, improving everything from customer satisfaction rates to lower operational costs to higher revenues.

Pure Resourcing Solutions, a provider of human resources, accounting and other support services for businesses, recently outlined five ways companies can use social media to engage their employees. The company stressed that not only do companies need to stay involved with their workers, but they also needed to communicate with them via social media, opening up the lines of communication to the entire workforce.

One of the simplest ways you can engage employees through social media is to tweet and post about upcoming events to raise awareness and build excitement. This can be done for everything from industry conferences to holiday parties and events.

An easy way to build your company’s LinkedIn (News - Alert) page is by asking employees to each contribute a section about their job and role at your organization. They can include information about how they gained their position and offer advice to others interested in similar roles. This not only boosts the available information about your organization but also helps your employees raise their own professional profiles.

Another way to utilize your employees’ creativity and engage them in corporate culture is to ask workers to blog as well as comment and interact with other workers’ blogs. This can occur across the entire organization, culling posts from employees at a variety of levels and seniority to give a broad picture of how your company operates. The process can also boost employees’ creativity and administrators can encourage that through awards programs and other incentives.

Social media may also be used to promote positive media coverage, awards and accolades your company receives. Sharing this type of news encourages pride among your employees and also offers an opportunity to post videos and other interactive communications.

Finally, setting up private or closed groups on Facebook (News - Alert) and other networking sites can give employees a way to communicate and collaborate on specific projects and topics in an informal setting. And encouraging sharing and information exchange is a huge step toward truly engaging your employees.