Social Media Use in the Workplace: How to Encourage It Productively

 As you develop guidelines for social media use in the workplace, don’t forget foster the creativity within your organization.

Encouraging social media use in the workplace can come with a list of responsibilities. For example, let’s say you’ve come up with a hashtag for your company, ACME, and your hashtag is #ACMEatWork. You want to promote the culture in your company to the public for branding purposes and recruiting, so you tell employees to take fun photos during the workday using the hashtag.

But what happens when your employees start spending significant amounts of time on social media, and you’re pretty darn sure they’re not using those hours documenting how cool company culture is?

This is where guidelines come into play. For example, for employees who aren’t in your marketing department, you may limit social media time to 30 minutes a day. For those within your marketing department, you may need to prioritize social media time.

Not all social media use at work is a bad thing. Consider the benefits of teammates who connect on social media and stay longer in a job because they enjoy their colleagues and build bonds with one another.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to get the rules mixed up, and you want to encourage your team to use social media in the workplace productively without nagging or looking over their shoulder. If you’re thinking about criticizing someone’s work, but want them to keep trying harder, don’t tell them how they’ve done it wrong, tell them all the ways they’re doing it right.

Build a custom social wall for your company by defining hashtags, keywords, phrases or @users. Then use our customization options to design your social wall.  Start making your social wall today.

Surprisingly, research shows that employees do accomplish productive tasks online while at work. According to Pew Research Center:

• 34% of employees use social media to take a mental break from their job, which isn’t such a bad thing – breaks are good.
• 27% connect with friends and family while at work, which is precisely the part most employers worry about.
• 24% make or support professional connections, which is excellent for those in sales and marketing.
• 20% get information that helps them solve problems at work.
• 17% build or strengthen personal relationships with coworkers, which decreases employee turnover rates.
• 17% learn about someone they work with.
• 12% ask work-related questions of people outside their organization, and haven’t you ever had to phone a friend?
• 12% ask such questions of people inside their organization.

You’ll notice that a good amount of people do turn their social media use in the workplace into a productive endeavor. Besides, short of blocking individual websites, people will continue to use social media when they should be working so you might as well offer some direction.

Your goal should be to encourage social media use in the workplace, as long as it’s used to your advantage:

• Cisco (which is an Everwall customer) has the  #WeAreCisco hashtag, which has been wildly successful; they saw a 600% increase in followers soon after launching it.
• T-Mobile is another excellent example. They used the hashtag #BeMagenta, which encouraged employees to show their workplace culture as a way of recruiting top talent.
• TripAdvisor‘s employees use the hashtag #GoTripAdvisor as a branding strategy by asking employees to share stories about their workdays and to plan meetups.

Should you incentivize social media use in the workplace?

You’ll learn quickly that when given the task of using a hashtag campaign you’ve created, some employees will be more eager and more accomplished at it than others. team members who struggle with social media shouldn’t be disciplined for not participating, especially if they are asked to use their personal accounts.

Instead, you can positively incentivize employees, instead. You could offer bonus vacation days, or a prize of the month for the most active users who are participating in your campaign.

How can you monitor social media use in the workplace?

You can document social media usage through a tool like Everwall. With Everwall, you can hang a screen somewhere in your office, where you can see everything people are posting from within the company using your hashtag. It’s an easy way to keep employees accountable, while also incentivizing their participation.

Alternatively, a great use of Everwall is for your social media team to display all brand mentions and replies to your posts on the screen, for everyone to see.