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Social media is a proven way for companies to communicate and engage with their internal audience, meaning employees and sometimes also their families, labor unions, suppliers, frequent customers or vip clients and others groups of interest.

But successful social media marketing for corporate communications is also very demanding. Companies have to produce a consistent stream of valuable content and consistently interact with their communities on social channels.

If you’re not careful, your social media marketing efforts can become an all-consuming monster, devouring time and resources. However, if you consider the rules and plan your social media automation strategy wisely, you can unleash the power of social media tools to improve communication inside your business.

Social Tools or Social Business Tools?

This misunderstanding of the benefits of collaboration underpins why collaboration tools don’t always help a firm in the way they should. If people mainly use these tools for social talk and for selling second-hand bikes, productivity gains through improved collaboration and communication will not be unlocked.

One way to change this state of affairs is to get leaders to show the way. Leaders’ use or non-use of collaboration tools strongly informs employees’ perceptions and attitudes towards those tools, according to a recent research published in the Harvard Business Review.

So if senior managers don’t signal the business focus of a social business tool, employees will often fail to recognize and realize that focus and instead view the tool as purely social. There are two ways to change this.

Communicating business value is as simple as informing your employees about how and why social collaboration tools are intended for business purposes. These campaigns are particularly effective if they are executed in an engaging way.

The best way to establish the tool’s business focus is to showcase it. By initiating work-related groups, discussions, competitions or idea campaigns, leaders or the internal communications team can guide and shape the way in which employees perceive and use social collaboration tools.

Here are 4 ways to help your corporate communications with Social Media:

1. Giving employees a voice

An active social media environment inside the company gives employees a platform that’s outside the “box” of their cubicles, teams, and departments. It offers them an avenue to celebrate their organization, express appreciation of a company event or share those little random successes during the day that make their work rewarding. Of course, social media works in both directions, so employees also get access to a new source of engaging and exciting to share, as well as a feedback channel through which they can voice their opinions and ideas for the organization.

2. Creating consumer-like experiences for employees

It makes sense to implement consumer-type strategies for internal communications– after all, employees are the internal consumers of the organization’s outputs. Every employee in the organization contributes something to the brand’s unique personality, which those employees transmit onwards through their Instagram or Twitter accounts. They become the customers and fans of their brand. Social means connections, collaboration, and an all-round deeper engagement in the microcosm that is the organization. And that’s leading naturally to employees feeling more comfortable communicating– and doing so in their own unique style and tone.

3. Visual makes a difference

Trying to explain something that’s happening on a screen using written text can be extremely time consuming and is frequently not effective at articulating exactly what you’re seeing. In this instance, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Visual communication can save a tremendous amount of time and energy and get your message across more accurately.

4. Corporate communication gets social

Facebook at Work is a version of the social network that can be used only within a company’s internal IT systems- personal Facebook accounts are maintained in separate silos, similarly to corporate and personal Gmail accounts. This “corporate” version looks very much like the familiar consumer product, with status updates, shared videos and articles, and event hosting, but it’s more about project updates and brand stories than holiday photos and cat memes.

At Wagner Consulting, we can help develop the right strategy for your business. Just give us a call and we’ll work on a personalized approach for your internal audiences.