Employees are a company’s most valuable asset. This fact can not be stressed often enough: employees are key to a company’s success.

So, how can a company use this valuable resource to its maximum advantage online? Turn them into active social media brand ambassadors. LinkedIn’s latest tool, “LinkedIn Elevate”, is designed to improve a company’s communication strategy by engaging its employees  in the business’ online marketing strategy.

For companies who are yet to join LinkedIn, or that have a page but simply don’t use it, it would definitely be worth discussing the benefits of the platform internally with colleagues. It’s important for a business, and particularly the executive board, to be aware and understand the role of social media in the company's wider strategy. Employees will always be the best spokespeople to talk about the business, especially if they understand why LinkedIn is important, what can be done on the platform and the results which can be achieved by utilising its huge database of 380 million users.

The first step to successful employee engagement in your LinkedIn strategy is for the CEO to set a good example to follow. It’s paramount that a company’s CEO has a strong presence on LinkedIn, understands the impact this platform can have on their business and encourages all of their staff members to be more active on LinkedIn.

The second step should be to analyse employees’ strengths and weaknesses, a lack of knowledge surrounding social media amongst senior staff members is a potential weakness. Seniors staff members hold a great deal of influence within the company and the industry as a whole, however some may lack social media skills, in which case they should be encouraged to learn how to use social networks correctly. Following on from the senior management team, the more tech-savvy employees in the wider team can be a very effective resource when it comes to sharing company updates and articles.

The third step is to encourage those key employees identified in step two to download the new LinkedIn Elevate app which is available to employees of businesses registered to use LinkedIn Elevate.

Following on from this, you need to give a reason for your employees to want to participate regularly. This can be done in many ways and depending on your specific business you may want to try some of these methods or devise your own to suit your goals.

1) Your company can use LinkedIn as an educational hub where employees are able to share and discuss changes within your company or industry, while providing insight to your followers.

2) Human Resources and the executive board may find that integrating LinkedIn into the staff’s training assists in developing a unified workforce. This will encourage employees to use the tool and feel more confident in doing so regularly. Dedicated training sessions should be considered within the induction process and can be carried out by any staff members who feel at ease with the platform or by third party professionals.

3) Company updates. Care should be taken to keep employees as up to date on company news as possible, the better informed they are the more likely they are to contribute to your strategy. If your company updates are hosted on LinkedIn, this provides an easily accessible platform to which all staff members can contribute. This alignment of the company strategy with the interests of the employees helps them feel valued and results in a higher rate of employee engagement on LinkedIn.

By investing time into both becoming more active on LinkedIn and training employees on the strengths of using it professionally, companies can achieve much more by creating an engaged community of employees.

To conclude, the internal staff have a key role to play on this platform. LinkedIn and its newest tool “LinkedIn Elevate” have the power to not only assist with your external business strategies, but also internal communications.