Ten ways social media can improve employee engagement and efficiency

1. Personalise your message: The traditional methods for delivering news are evolving. An email broadcast from your CEO still has a place, but when the message is sensitive why not consider using a webcast? It adds a more personable touch and gives a face to face element in a digital environment.
2. Bring your journey to life: Telling your organisational story has never been easier. Using films to bring your journey to life is a powerful engagement tool. Interviewing your leaders and using sound bites from people across your business are just two excellent methods to really bring your journey to life.
3. Profile your leaders: The closer the leaders are to a business the more engaged people will be. Blogging is a great tool to bring the leaders closer to people and managing perception. Short, regular updates in the style of twitter are a credible method to use to keep people engaged and up to date with news and progress.
4. Sharing ideas: Discussion forums are a useful tool in sharing ideas and innovation. Allowing people to start topics and discussing issues is also an effective method to moderate issues effecting engagement in a controlled environment – a digital grapevine. Innovation is the holy-grail for all businesses; social media can be a facilitator to innovation.
5. Create a community: Sharing skills, experiences, ideas, and knowing your colleagues are all important factors to high engagement. By giving employees a profile page you can create a virtual community; a really important tool especially in a multi-site business. With My Site there is an out of the box solution on SharePoint.
6. Make it a conversation: Interacting is a key advantage of social media. A platform of high engagement is based upon a two way conversation; by using blogs, live webcasts, and discussion forums you have the opportunity to really get that conversation started.
7. Timely messaging: On occasions there are times when a message needs to be delivered instantly. The traditional channel has always been email; but blogs now offer an alternative delivery method, especially if they are established as a primary channel.
8. Build relationships: In a modern business with multiple time pressures and multi-sites it isn’t always easy to build key relationships. By developing a virtual community and a strong social media presence you are empowering people to develop a new kind of business relationship.
9. Reduce costs: Expensive events and print media are slowly becoming less relevant. By embracing social media you can reduce the cost of a large scale all company event, or a regular printed magazine. After an initial investment you can achieve year on year savings.
10. Be seen as progressive: All businesses want to be seen as innovative and progressive, both externally and internally. Those businesses that drive high engagement are the ones not afraid to try something new. Be at the forefront of the social media revolution and continually look for ways to be innovative in your communications.

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