How To: Train Employees To Handle Your Social Media

To those of us who are very active in social media, it may seem sometimes like it’s been around forever. The very first social media site I ever signed up for was Twitter, and that was over 3 years ago. I’ve been hooked ever since, and like many people, to me it all seems like second nature.

For many brands and businesses, it’s a very different story. I can understand how it could be complicated to figure it out. If a brand is active in social media, they have to deal with customer feedback right in front of everyone. If a brand is not active in social media, they are perceived as not caring what their customers think. It’s definitely a double-edged sword for some companies.

That’s not even to mention the decision about whether to hire an outside firm to handle social media, or whether to put it in the hands of an employee who could severely damage the brand’s reputation with one tweet or Facebook update. In addition to all this, there is the ROI aspect, which continues to be tricky to calculate.

If you decide to take the route of training your employees and empowering them to handle your social media (instead of hiring a firm or an outside person to handle it), you might be interested in this infographic created by MindFlash. It goes into detail about some things to consider when training your employees and educating them about what your social media goals are.

There are several companies who do this well, and the list is too long to mention here. One company I can think of off the top of my head is the hosting company called @mediatemple. They have 18 “tweetologists” (employees) who handle their very busy Twitter account. The employees are listed on their Twitter background along with their initials. Each person who sends a tweet from that account includes those initials so everyone knows who it is who is responding. You’d be surprised at how much they are able to handle right there on Twitter. It’s very fun to watch. Thank you to my Twitter friend @NotEasyToForget who pinned this infographic on his Pinterest today, which is where I originally saw it. Nice!