On Social Media Day 2022 (30 June), Luan Wise hosted The Lighthouse Social Media Summit.

Attendees had the opportunity to watch five talks, join live panel sessions to interact with speakers, join a Social Media Day quiz (with prizes!), and network with other attendees. It was a jam-packed day.

Here’s our highlights from two of the sessions…

Employees as Influencers on Social Media, Sarah Goodall

Sarah Goodall is the CEO of Tribal Impact, a specialist organisation that brings global B2B brands to life through digitally activating their employee voices on social media. She spoke about the impact that employees can have on the growth of a business by essentially becoming influencers. Now, this doesn’t directly mean that workers should start learning TikTok dances and memorising the viral lip-syncing sounds during their 9-5. Instead, the term ‘social listening’ was introduced, which is ‘identifying and assessing what is being said about a company or brand on the internet’.

Why is influence important?

Some key reasons for why brands should look at their influence, that Sarah Goodall identified include:

  • B2B buyers are now digital-first- often, buyers start with a google search, go into forums, and ask people that they know for recommendations.
  • Talent is influenced online- 82% of employees will research a CEO’s online presence when considering joining a company.

Your employees are influential

Your employees are already active on many social media platforms and already have a cumulative social reach that is around 10x the size of that of your corporate accounts. Interestingly, 76% of people say that they are more likely to trust the recommendations of someone they know over any form of branded content. This is key for how brands can activate their employees as influencers. Asking employees to promote your brand and share content on their personal accounts, if they are comfortable doing so, could be a great marketing strategy to increase reach.

Making Your Social Media Accessible, Paul Speller

Paul Speller’s role as Accessibility and Usability Consultant at AbilityNet includes carrying out design reviews, accessibility audits, user testing and providing in-depth consultancy to organisations on web accessibility and usability.

Why is accessible social media important?

Paul starts by stating that being accessible is about people, and it is people who use social media. Everybody is different and accessibility is about catering for different people with different needs. In terms of business, accessibility is good for the company as you will be able to reach a larger audience; have a good reputation; increase your SEO and get increased engagement.

Accessibility benefits everyone. Some are affected by short-term injuries or conditions but that can also be permanent and situational dependant.

Here are some of the top tips to ensure that your content is accessible.

  • Image descriptions- Most images that you post on social media are informative. So, by providing a text alternative for assistive technology, browsers and search engines, you will become more accessible.
  • Colour and contrast- First of all, social media content creators should not rely on colour to convey what they want to say, due to those with colour blindness. Speller recommends content creators to use patterns or shapes as well as colour, to make their content more accessible. For contrast, the advised contrast is 4.5:1 for regular text and 3:1 for larger text and graphics. This can be done by using a colour contrast analyser tool.
  • Infographics and images of text- In general, avoid images of text as they do not scale well. Those with poor vision who may need to zoom in can lose quality if the text is on the image and may not be able to read the text.
  • Audio and video- Captions should capture all essential audio and must be clear and accurate. They should not be any more than two lines and you may find that your platform can create captions automatically. By using audio description, you can describe any visuals necessary for understanding.
  • Hashtags- Again, use hashtags considerately and keep in mind that the text will be announced by assistive technologies such as screen readers. When a hashtag is a phrase, it will be read out as one word if it is not in ‘camel case’. For example, #blacklivesmatter would not be accessible, but #BlackLivesMatter would be.

Conclusion

The Lighthouse Social Summit returns on 29 September, click here to register for your FREE place.

Tinisha Osu is a Marketing Executive with two degrees in Psychology. She is the first-author of a published psychology paper and is beginning her career in marketing through blog-writing, creating social media content and running marketing campaigns.