Ninety-seven percent of Fortune 500 businesses use social media to reach their stakeholders. Your people are your most important stakeholders. So why aren’t you using social media to connect with them?
Social Media Is a Decades-Old Proven Communication Channel
At this point, social media is embedded in our society. Facebook alone has been around for more than two decades.
There’s a lot of debate over which social media platform was the original one. Some say Six Degrees; others point out various chat boards and communities that connected people from all over the world beginning in the 1970s. Social media as we now know it began to take shape in the late 1990s with the introduction of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). While AIM wasn’t a traditional social media site, its network of chat rooms, away messages, buddy icons, usernames, and instant communication features set the stage for what was to come.
By the time MySpace and Facebook became popular in the early 2000s, people were familiar with using web-based platforms to connect with friends and family by sharing pictures and updates about their lives. Given how integrated social media is in people’s lives today, we should assume that it’s here to stay.
According to an employee benefits blog by David Rook, in 2018, the average person spent nearly 2 hours or 116 minutes a day on social media.1 And users don’t just stick to one platform. Belle Wong, a contributor for Forbes Advisor, noted in the article “Top Social Media Statistics and Trends of 2024” that the average social media user spreads their digital footprint across 6 to 7 platforms every month.2 The era of posting status updates only on one platform and calling it a day is long gone.
So, what does this have to do with your benefits communications? A lot, actually. The evolution of social media has introduced new internal and external platforms—like LinkedIn, Slack, Viva Engage, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky—for you to communicate your organization’s benefits to employees, recruits, and key stakeholders. Choosing the right platform is key. But regardless of venue, it’s critical to develop a plan to make it easy for your audience to take the actions you want them to take.
We understand that that’s easier said than done. Here’s what we recommend.
Plan Your Outreach with an Annual Content Calendar
A key component of successful communications is consistently interacting with your audience to drive engagement. Consistent communication helps build awareness, education, and understanding of the amazing benefits your organization has to offer. It can also give employees the information they need, when they need it. Developing an annual plan makes using social media feel more manageable. An annual content calendar, as part of your annual benefits communications strategy, can help guide your entire social media journey and ensure that you have the right content planned for the entire year.
How We’ve Done It
We partnered with Workday to create a content calendar for their Slack communications to ensure that their communications were engaging and aligned with their overarching benefits communications strategy. Slack is a workplace messaging solution that organizes topics by various channels. Posts are similar to many popular social media platforms in that users can engage with them by reacting with a “like” or an emoji. They can also respond to the post and repost it. Workday’s content calendar outlined various Slack posts by topic, channel, employee audience, and targeted deploy date. Workday was very thoughtful about what posts went out on Slack and when, so they didn’t overwhelm employees with the number of messages they’d receive. This allowed employees to digest the content and find connection to the broader topics being communicated through the comprehensive benefits strategy. And while having a content calendar is great to ensure that you have content consistently flowing for the year, you can always make adjustments as your priorities shift.
When building your content calendar, consider these important questions:
- What platforms, accounts, or channels are you using to communicate?
- Who are your target audiences?
- What are you communicating, how are you saying it, and what action do you want your target audiences to take?
- How will you measure your success?
Let’s walk through each one.
Choose Platforms That Align With Your Goals
Before choosing your platforms, you need to be clear on what you want to achieve. Are you looking to promote your new parental time-off policies to attract prospective new hires? Try LinkedIn. Or do you want to drive action to a certain benefits program that employees aren’t using enough but would benefit from? Look into internal Slack and Teams channels or consider one of the many popular external platforms.
One of the main reasons Workday wanted to build their annual content calendar around Slack was to solve a major communications challenge: email fatigue. For most organizations, emails are the best way to consistently reach employees, because most internal departments and external vendors are communicating to employees via email. Workday realized their employees were receiving so many emails throughout the day that they barely had time to read them all. They also recognized that with the tendency to rely heavily on email, there was a higher likelihood that other channels and platforms were being underutilized. As a result, they decided to communicate more on Slack. Slack was the perfect platform for Workday to communicate benefits information, because it was already well-established among their employee population, and it avoided employees’ emails.
Additionally, Slack groups topics by channel, not by account. So, after Workday identified Slack as their platform of choice, the team was intentional in designating which channel their posts should use. For example, have a pet lovers’ channel? Post about your pet insurance benefits. A channel for new parents? That’s where your backup care posts can go. And in addition to posting to individual channels, be sure to post to a benefits-only channel as well. The key takeaway is that identifying specific channels helps you increase your reach by targeting specific employee groups.
Connect with an Audience That’s Already Engaged
One of the biggest challenges on social media is building an audience. Odds are your organization already has a social media account with an established audience that you can use to your advantage. This may be a LinkedIn account that posts company and culture topics or an Instagram account that is all about a day in the life of your employees.
In addition to leveraging your organization’s broader accounts, you may want to create designated benefits accounts that you can use to communicate about benefits-specific topics. This account can be the place where employees, key stakeholders, and prospective talent can get information and ask questions, allowing you to better manage engagement (i.e., comments) on your posts and direct messages (DMs). Make sure to use the organization’s broader accounts to promote your benefits account too. The key to successful benefits accounts is that your target audiences feel that this is a viable channel to get the information they need, when they need it. This means that, in addition to posting, you’ll need to check your DMs, mentions, and comments, and decide on an approach for responding to them! Will you reply in the platform or send them through a help desk or to another partner?
Like Workday, Lenovo’s benefits team wanted to use other platforms to engage their target audience. Before creating their own accounts, they checked with their partners to see if they could use any existing accounts that already showed participation among their targeted audience. Lenovo learned that their onsite personal fitness vendor, Exos, had an Instagram account for Lenovo employees. The benefits team decided to use this account, and we worked with them to create health and well-being promotional posts. These posts aligned with their Instagram account’s established annual communication initiatives.
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Example of a Lenovo Instagram post promoting fitness
Consider How You Want to Communicate and What You Want Your Target Audiences to Do
There can be endless content to scroll through on various social media platforms. As a content creator, a key question to consider is how do you get your target audience to stop scrolling and become involved with your content? The answer: Keep your posts short and engaging.
That said, your company’s benefits account on social media isn’t the place to post an SPD. Even if you promise an unblurry photo of the Loch Ness monster hidden within, people will scroll right past it after the first sentence. In fact, according to Forbes, short-form videos are the most engaging type of content on social media.2 Stick to a short (under 1 minute!) video that can be reposted by your followers.3 Or try using a gif, a type of post that is intended to grab users’ attention by showing quick screens with key messages that are easy to understand. A gif can be easily paired with a short content blurb and posted on almost any platform. Here’s an example of a gif we created with one of our tech clients who wanted to communicate their new global paid parental leave benefits to employees in a fun and appealing way.
SLB's gif promoting paid parental leave benefits
While it’s important to keep your posts short and interesting, the truth is that sometimes benefits require a lot of information. That’s why it’s important to give employees a call to action, so they can access more information elsewhere—like a public-facing benefits website or secured intranet site.3 Keeping your content high level and directing people elsewhere will also help alleviate any chances of posting private or sensitive information.
Tap into Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Content and Use These Key Lessons to Inform Your Future Campaigns
Finally, as you begin communicating on new platforms, be sure to lean into what’s working and what isn’t. Besides measuring engagement with the obvious—likes, comments, and reposts—most platforms provide you with an analytics dashboard to track in-depth utilization. There, you can view who is seeing your post, when they’re viewing it, what demographics they fall into, and more. You can also add unique identifiers to the end of your call-to-action links on the various platforms you’re using. This will help you see who clicked the call-to-action links on the various posts you created and what action they took as a result. Together, these metrics can help inform your overall benefits communications strategy by allowing you to see what’s working for your population and what isn’t. Then, you can use these findings to enlighten your future campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Don’t let the ever-changing social media landscape scare you away. With the speed at which technology is constantly evolving, now is a great time to tap into new communications methods to expand your outreach and tell employees about the amazing benefits package you have to offer.
Gabby Kerrigan, Senior Consultant, Communications, was a co-contributor in developing this content.
We’re proud to work with organizations that value their people. If you want to learn more, we’d love to talk.
1. The Role of Social Media In Employee Benefits Communication, Hub2. Top Social Media Statistics And Trends, Forbes
3. How Social Media Influences Plan Sponsors’ Participant Communications, PlanSponsor
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