How to Gather Social Media Content From Staff

More customers than ever before are using social media to find new businesses, services, and products. Posting frequently is one of the best strategies to attract more attention and more customers. However, finding high-quality content consistently can be a challenge. Working with your employees can help you gather content faster. Let’s take a look at some strategies to help you gather social media content from staff.

How to Gather Social Media Content From Staff

Whether you have just one employee, ten, or a thousand, gathering social media content from staff can help you reach more potential customers. When you ask your employees to create and submit social media content, you’ll also get other points of view and fresh perspectives, so you’re not posting the same type of content over and over. To gather social media content from staff, you’ll need an easy and well-organized plan, and you’ll need to communicate this plan to your employees.

Collect Your Tools

Before you can gather social media content from staff, you’ll need a way to quickly and easily collect, review, edit, and share the content you collect. You’ll also need an easy way for employees to submit videos. You’ll need some tools to do this.

Allowing employees to submit social media content directly to the platform might be problematic. Instead, you might ask employees to submit the content they create to another platform, where you can review it, edit it as needed, and then submit it yourself. This will not only give you more control over the type of content that you’re posting, but it will also allow you to post the content in the right place, at the right time.

You can make it easy for staff to submit their pictures and videos by creating a landing page and form. Then, connect a video collection tool, like Boast. Employees can submit their pictures or video with the form, and include necessary text-based captions or other information in the form field. With Boast, you can review the content at your leisure, repost it to a designated spot on your website, repost to any social media platform, or download the content to repost to another platform, like your social media management software.

This might seem like a lot of work upfront just to collect social media content. However, consider how much time you’ll save when you don’t have to create all of your content yourself. By taking some time to set up your landing page, form, and software, you’ll save a lot of time in the long run.

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Let Your Staff Know

With your software and landing page in place, you’ll need to talk to your staff about your plan. For this to be most effective, your employees will need to know what kind of content you’re looking for, how they can submit it, and what they might get in return if the content performs well. You might run through the process with your employees once so everyone knows how it works, or include this as a part of your training process.

There are many different types of content that you might be looking for. And, your employees may have creative, effective ideas of their own. Here are a few of the content ideas you might give your employees.

Behind-the-scenes: Your staff are the best people to give customers a behind-the-scenes look at how your business works.
Product spotlight: When you get new products in, you might encourage your employees to do an “unboxing” video and a brief summary of what the product is or does.
Special events: When you have a sale, new project, or another special event, ask your staff to film videos or take photos to promote it.
Recommendations: If your staff make recommendations in your store, encourage them to share their knowledge and their favorites online as well.

You’ll need to review with your employees what type or types of content you’re looking for, such as video, photos, text, or a combination of media types. You may also want to cover what is or isn’t appropriate, such as language, political leanings, subject matter, and more. You might create a content policy that your employees can reference to see what type of content is acceptable.

Incentivize Great Content

Some employees may enjoy creating and sharing social media content, and the process may be its own reward. However, this isn’t a very reliable strategy to gather effective content. Instead, you might consider rewarding staff members who create content that performs well. This might include a financial bonus for content that generates a particular amount of interactions, or a percentage of sales generated through a post. Or, you might give employees extra break time to produce social media content.

The best way to find what incentives would work best would be to ask your employees. What are they most interested in? How much time would they need to create great videos or photos? Communicate your goals and needs, and listen to your employees’ as well.

Review and Post

Once your staff understands the process, the incentives, and starts to submit content, you’ll need to review and share the content they create. With Boast, you can review a gallery of content at any time, and organize content with tags to make sorting easier. You can also integrate social media platforms with Boast to make sharing effortless.

You might create a content calendar each month that you can share with employees to show what kind of content you’re looking for. Or, you might ask your employees to submit content ideas to a calendar. That can help you maintain a steady stream of content, which will help you generate more interactions and bring in more customers. Posting content frequently and regularly is one of the most important factors in growing your social media presence and generating more sales from it.

When you work closely with your employees and communicate clearly, you can gather great social media content from staff. Your staff are very close to your business, and they can help you create content that customers will be interested in. With the right tools and an organized plan, you can gather and share stellar content quickly and easily.