Are you struggling with how to help employees leverage Twitter for the benefit of your company? We have all heard stories of how employees have damaged a company’s brand via social media. However, marketing and communications executives have a tremendous opportunity to harness the power of social media to significantly benefit their organizations by enlisting the help of employees.

Consider Zillow. The provider of free real estate information is leveraging the power of Twitter to share trend information with consumers, report on celebrity home purchases and drive additional traffic to its Web site. Just do a search on Twitter and look at all the content about Zillow and you will see what I mean.

After looking at Zillow’s Twitter presence, we began thinking and researching best practices to motivate employees to tweet on behalf of the company. We came up with some interesting findings. Below you’ll find our five tips on how to harness the power of your employees on Twitter and other social media networks. After all, shouldn’t your employees all play a role in delivering the right messages about your company?

1. Establish some ground rules. Make sure employees know to only share information that is public. Ask employees to check in with you if they are uncertain about whether the information they want to share via Twitter or any other social networking platform is okay for public dissemination.
2. Provide your employees with education around best practices. Make sure your employees are familiar with best practices surrounding the use of Twitter. For instance, they should not be spamming followers with company marketing messages, but instead engaging with key audiences. Additionally, they shouldn’t use hash tags in an inappropriate manner and should also avoid slamming competitors, co-workers, etc.
3. Consider setting up consistent handles on Twitter. The Conway, Arkansas area Chamber of Commerce has set up consistent user names or handles on Twitter for 10 of its employees and it has been very effective. Jamie Gates, who is in charge of the Chamber’s social media effort TheChamberLife.com explains, “Our employees all have consistent Twitter usernames. For example, I am @chambergates. Other employees use @chambermary and @chamberbertj. We then encourage these employees to tweet positive updates about community events, services, special offers and other benefits that come from membership to the Chamber. We have had a great deal of success from this effort.”
4. Help your employees be effective. Each week, compile and send a note to your employees outlining five to 10 relevant stats or fun facts they can share about your company via Twitter. You can highlight informative articles about your company and ask your employees to share the links with their followers. Again, let them know that this content is for public dissemination and if they have other information that they want to share, they should get your approval first.
5. Remember you have to make it easy and fun. Lastly, if your employees are going to use Twitter on your company’s behalf you need to make it fun and easy for them. You also need to have faith that with the proper education and training your employees will make smart choices about what to share on social media networks. It is your job as the vice president of communications or marketing to help them understand the ground rules, arm them with content and monitor what is being said about your brand.

Clearly, before implementing any activity around social media the heads of communications departments need to consider their company’s business and communication needs carefully. It is also important to seek legal counsel to ensure all social media activity being asked of employees is in compliance with the law and your company’s policies.

We hope these tips are helpful as you look at leveraging the power of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for your organization.