One of the best ways to help promote your company is through social media platforms, and one of the best ways to promote your company’s social media activities is through your employees. But how do you convince your workers to engage with company-related posts online?  Remember you can’t force employees to engage with your company content using their personal accounts, nor would you want to if you could.  

I suggest simply asking them and then providing them with detailed instructions on how to help and engage.  Below is a sample letter.

Social Media Engagement for Employees: Sample Letter

We are making an effort to ramp up our social media presence, and we are hoping that you can help us in this process.

(Company Name Goes Here) now has profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and Google+. If you are a member on any of these sites, we would appreciate you taking the following steps to promote the company:

How To Promote Us On Social Networks:

• For Facebook, please make sure that you have liked the company page and that you like our status updates when you actually enjoy them. Also, we would like you to share content that we post whenever you really like it.
• Please follow us on Twitter @(Your Companies URL Goes Here). Retweeting us when we pop up in your tweetstream and/or mentioning us in your posts is the best way that you can promote the company on Twitter.  You could also add our twitter handle to your profiles description. You do this by putting a @ symbol in front of your Twitter handle. Example: @IamJoshAnderson
• On LinkedIn, please follow our company page and list us as your employer. We are beginning to post content to the site, so please share it when you come across it and are proud of it. We also have a group page and we would encourage you to become a member and start some conversations if you have something to contribute.
• For those with YouTube accounts, please subscribe to our Channel. When we post new videos, it would be helpful if you would share this on your other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. We would also love to get comments from you when you have something to contribute. If you enjoy a video please “like” it.
• We are new to Google+ and are just beginning to build our circles. Please add us to your circles, and we will add you to ours. Once we are in your circles, please plus-1 posts you enjoy when you see them in your stream. In addition, we would encourage you to share our posts and comment on them.

For all of these networks, please don’t hesitate to recommend our social profiles to other people in the industry.

In addition to promoting the content that we post to our various social network profiles, we would like for each of you to promote our different social profiles in your company signature.

Here’s what we would suggest your signature look like:

Last Request:

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you for your help!

Following Up With Employees Regarding Social Media Assistance

While the letter is a good start, you should follow it up with in-house education sessions with your employees. I also recommend doing a quick audit of the executive team and using it as an example with middle management. It will show lower level employees that even the top dogs need help with improving their social profiles. You may also want to share the changes the C-Level team made to their profiles with other employees, so that everyone can see that the C-Level team is willing to take the same steps that you are asking of others

It can be difficult to get employees to engage with your business’ social media presence, but it is worth the effort that it takes. Good luck!