In a world where social media has really taken over industries and communications, a lot of organizations are still trying to understand the best organizational structure for their social media. Many brands still believe that creating a social media team as its own silo is the best approach. This is the furthest from the truth. Social media should be incorporated into all of the various business units to really maximize the use of social media.

A lot of businesses really forget to leverage their best brand advocates:

The employees and their community on social media.

Your employees are your greatest brand advocates and it’s important to empower your employees to help generate buzz around your brand. The employees that feel like they have a piece of the brand and can help deliver the brand image will help spread buzz around your company. Think about how you would feel if your boss gave you the responsibility of having a stake in the company outside of your traditional job. What would happen?

First, because you know so much about the brand, you would be able to generate a lot of content.

Second, you would be more loyal to the brand because you feel like you have more responsibility and a larger voice.

Third, you would feel like you have a duty to spread positive content around the brand.

But what actually happens in the business?

Brands are too afraid to give employees so much responsibility. Companies feel like they can’t trust their employees with their social media. Now think about what that means for the actual company. You are telling your employees that you don’t trust them with the knowledge and with privacy on social media.

Let’s think about this for a second:

You trust your employees with the financials, the marketing, the operations, business strategy,  but you don’t trust them with social media? 

So what is the new structure that companies should be implementing? Similar to the shift in customer experience and focusing on the consumer, it is now time to start empowering your employees and leveraging their expertise to create employee advocates.

Employee Advocates: New Social Media Structure

The new structure for your social media strategy should include ALL of your employees, or at least most of them. Create Employee Advocates. By including all of your employees into the social media strategy it enables you to be creating content as a business. Your employee advocates will create more and much more frequent content than if you didn’t have employee advocates a core part of your social media strategy. So, if you invite employee advocates (all of your employees) to use the brand’s social media account to create content, what will happen?

Your employees will feel empowered and trusted, it will show transparency through your company, creativity and constant content creation and increased organic growth online.

Through a united brand and leveraging your best brand advocates, your employee advocates, your brand will be more cohesive. Your brand will diminish the silos within the company that often creates conflict. Employees will trust one another and your brand will be a stronger brand online.

So I dare you. I challenge you. I am giving you the permission to really trust, empower and motivate your employees to use social media under your own brand name. Turn your employees into Employee Advocates. If you do trust them with other parts of the company, why wouldn’t you trust them with delivering a message about your company?