When creating social media strategies, we often separate content into different topic pillars or buckets. For example, educational content, branded content, and thought leadership content. These are high-level groupings that are common across many brand accounts on social media.
Another topic is company culture — what goes on behind the scenes at a workplace that the average social media user may not know about. Should brands post about their company culture? And if so, what are some good examples? If you’re a digital marketer, read on to learn more and get tips from our social media experts!
Should Your Brand Share Content About Your Company’s Culture on Social Media?
As with many questions about social media strategy, the short answer is, “It depends on your digital marketing goals.” The longer answer will require some additional questions!
What are the primary and secondary objectives of your brand’s social media presence? Are you looking to…
- Build brand awareness?
- Establish yourself as a credible company?
- Generate leads and revenue?
- Attract and hire top talent?
There are other digital marketing goals and some of them may overlap. That being said, it helps to understand the advantages of sharing company culture content. Here are some of the ways marketers can benefit:
- Improving authenticity: This type of content helps build stronger relationships and loyalty among existing and potential customers — and prospective candidates.
- Highlighting the workplace: Shine the spotlight on current employees and workplace culture, which could entice job seekers!
- Sharing company values: Promote culture-related content that can help communicate what’s important to the company.
Here’s what we think: It never hurts to include culture-related content on your social media feed! Across our clients, culture-related content tends to be among the best-performing topics when compared to other content buckets. That’s just the nature of how these posts — and social media — work. Social media users tend to gravitate towards these types of posts, especially since they often feature people.
What Are Some Examples of Company Culture Content For Social Media?
Depending on the existing activities your employees engage in and what goes on at your company, marketers may have a treasure trove of content to share on their company’s social media channels — or, you might have to dig deeper to find content to create a post! Here are some examples of culture-related posts:
- Photos taken of a company or employee-led volunteer initiative
- A team party or event (e.g. holiday party, team-building exercise)
- Celebrating an employee’s work anniversary (e.g. 5th, 10th, 15th year anniversary)
- Sharing recent awards that aren’t tied to the company’s offerings, but more along the lines of “Best Workplace” awards or employee recognition awards
- Showing what a daily workday looks like and other behind-the-scenes content
For marketers struggling with where to begin, employee anniversaries are often one of the easiest places to start since you just need to determine the year someone started. Team parties and events are another option, whether it’s a holiday dinner during Christmas or posting behind-the-scenes photos of a “town hall” meeting.
How Often Should I Share Company Culture-Related Posts?
Another area to consider is how often marketers should be sharing culture-related posts on their company’s social media feeds. Again, the answer is, “It depends!”
It depends on how often and how easily you’re able to gather this type of content, your existing content calendar and other topics you want to share, and, of course, your overall social media objectives.
In many cases, company-related content that isn’t tied to a date and can be shared at any time can help fill in any gaps in your content calendar. Having a lighter social media week than usual? Stick a culture-related post in there as a throwback!
However, it’s important to balance your culture-related posts with other strategic topics, such as thought leadership to position your brand, branded content that promotes your offerings, and educational content for your customers.
Case Study: Spark Growth
Next, here’s a case study featuring our very own agency! At Spark Growth, we decided to separate our content strategy by platform.
LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Facebook are where we share social media updates and insights that we think marketers should check out. TikTok is where we post about company culture and share our takes on social media trends. Instagram is where we post high-level marketing insights and strategically repurpose some of our TikToks to Instagram Reels.
Why do we separate culture-related content by platform? It’s a combination of many factors, including the audience we’re targeting on each platform, the types of content social media users expect to see on a platform, what we find works well, and the app-specific features available to us.
We’re not the only ones to use this platform-specific strategy. Microsoft’s TikTok and LinkedIn content are much different, approaching the topic of culture-related content in other ways, such as featuring employees more heavily with TikTok videos and taking a more business-formal approach.
What Does Your Company Culture Say About Your Brand?
As marketers, what do you want your company’s social media followers to know about your brand? On social media, it’s not just about your excellent customer service or high-quality products. Just as important is being social and engaging with other users online who may be curious to know more about the brand, its vision, and what it stands for.