Putting Your People to Work for You on Social Media

Let’s get real here. It’s time you started getting real on social media. What in the world am I talking about? I’m talking about the way you communicate with your customers. I’m talking about humanizing your brand.

I’m a big advocate of building your brand—or at least your marketing content—around the people that make up your business or organization. Why? Because ultimately those people help set your business apart. As a small business, the relationships you’ve developed with your clientele are the biggest advantage and differentiator you have! And who is developing those relationships? You. Your employees. People.

Your customers (i.e. the humans you interact with online) are the same ones who live and work in your communities, the same ones who visit and shop in your business. They’re the people who know who you are and what your business is all about. In developing relationships with them, which goes both ways by the way, you are learning more about your customer needs and wants and how you can deliver the best possible service or products to your customers!

How can you humanize your brand? Here are a couple of ideas.

1. Put your employees on your website or in e-newsletters. Don’t use boring old stock photos. Hire a photographer, recruit a photography student or find an employee who is good at taking photos to get pictures of your people doing their thing day in and day out.

2. Let your staff (and you) shine on Facebook. Feature employee profiles, ask employees to showcase their favorite products or something unrelated to your business entirely, share employee news (Deidre just got promoted to general manager. Congrats!) or take your fans behind the scenes.

People get on social media to, well, be social. They want to interact with friends and family—and even businesses they care about! But they don’t want to have products and services shoved in their faces every time they log in. Having fun on your social media channels featuring the people who make up your business can still keep what you do top of mind!

​How do you humanize your brand?