With all of this talk of digital natives and digital legacies, let’s take a look now at who is actually using social media in the workplace.

[tweetthis]Like it or not, your employees are checking Facebook at work.[/tweetthis] They may even be taking photos and posting to Instagram of that awesome potluck the CEO threw for the entire administrative team last week. #yummy! #thanksboss!

But what does social media really mean for your business? Are you utilizing the tools of social media to change the face of your company? Is your newsletter changing with the times, or is it still a 3-sided page that gets mailed out to the masses? Newsletters are great for dumping large chunks of information on your clients and colleagues. But social media allows you to piecemeal that information out in little tidbits, bite size morsels if you will. As we’ve discussed before on this blog, it’s important to grasp that millennials are a new creature entirely. Give them 140 characters and they’ll come up with something poignant and life-changing (or at least they will think it is so). But hand them a printout of 4-5 meaty articles in a company newsletter, and you’ll be lucky if they even read the first and last sentence of each paragraph (cut to freshman English in college when the assigned reading was almost as boring as the Sunday newspaper that your dad read at the breakfast table).

So in this digital age, social media begs companies to cut to the chase and get to the point. Your audience’s attention span is dwindling with each new generation that enters the workforce. These kids are all about instant gratification, technology at their fingertips, and short snappy snippets of information. So let’s give the people what they want!

1. Use social media for recruitment (check out our Social Media & Recruitment blog here: https://peoplescapehr.com/2015/06/)

2. Check out your online reviews – you may not be using social media but I guarantee your customers are!

3. Improve communication with your employees – think blog, Twitter, hashtags, and collaborate with your employees outside of the box.

4. Brands are necessary. Is your company recognizable? The more you use social media, the more presence you will have amongst your colleagues and potential talent pool.

Like renowned author and business speaker Erik Qualman says, “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.”