As I’m sure you already know, social media has a large impact on businesses today. If you’re not using it, you’re behind. Each platform has unique ways of helping you promote your brand, send out messages, and interact with patrons. It also allows users/patrons to give constructive criticism (bad reviews) that, in the long run, can help you improve your establishment and win new customers.
More likely than not, all your employees engage on one social media platform or another. This creates an even larger opportunity to promote your business on social media. Employees may have friends and family who are local to your establishment, thus, if they see a positive post about the establishment, that could in turn bring in more customers. Basically, more free advertising!
There are typically three types of social media employees: the ones who rave about your establishment and how wonderful of a place it is to work, the ones who never post about the establishment they work for, most likely for privacy reasons (the ghosts), and finally the venters, the ones who let it all out on social media when anything bad happens.
In the video gaming industry, word of mouth about your establishment is very important. In a dream world, every employee you have will post glowing reviews about your establishment on their social media accounts, Yelp, and Glassdoor. Any and all positive posts from employees is an effective way to gain more customers.
Unfortunately, some employees may be ghosts on social media. What do I mean by that? They’re pretty private about their work life and typically don’t list that they work for your establishment (even if they love it there). Most likely, you will always have a few employees like this. Nothing lost, nothing gained, in terms of promoting.
Finally, you have those employees who use social media to vent. Typically, this is bad because they may be saying bad things about your establishment. This can hurt your brand, and if you become aware of it, you should speak to them immediately to solve any problems that they are having while working there. It is always best to speak with management about issues, so they can be resolved, and also puts a stop to them blowing up on social media about it.
You can’t control what your employees do in their personal lives or how they run their social media accounts. However, you can put into place a social media policy that provides guidelines of what you consider appropriate if your employees choose to mention their association with your business online.