Is your company using LinkedIn to its maximum potential? What about your employees? Social media plays a large role in content marketing as one of the key distribution vehicles for content.
Employees are busy doing… well, their jobs. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use some tactics to help get them on the social sharing train, and really spread your brand’s content to as many eyes as possible!
Create remarkable, inviting content and empower your employees to show their love for your company content by sharing it. One important realisation than many companies miss is that the greatest marketers are the individuals within the company itself.
Employees are more likely to share company content on LinkedIn because it is a business-related platform. By comparison, they might not be inclined to do so on Facebook, which most people use for personal purposes.
Here are some simple ways to help your employees share your content on LinkedIn.
1) Promote the Program
The most difficult challenge lies in convincing your employees that your company content should be shared. One useful tip is finding and appointing a leader. If you (ideally) have employees that are passionate about LinkedIn marketing and believe in it, then their interests should at least slightly overlap with the interests of your audience.
There is no reason that your social content can’t be naturally interesting for both prospective readers and employees.
2) Communicate the Goal
First step is to clarify your company’s efforts to establish industry credibility and what it takes to get followers for your social media channels. The goal of your LinkedIn Employee Strategy is for your employees to help with social networking.
Once you have actively engaged employees in the social sharing game, don’t leave them hanging!
People love transparent data and seeing the results of what they have accomplished. So, show them the numbers! Encourage them to share content on their personal profiles and, at the end of the month, show them the results:
- Can you see an increased number of website visits coming from LinkedIn? Share it with your employees!
- Can you see an increased conversion rate? Share!
- Can you see an increased social media activity (more likes, shares and comments on the social media plugins)? Share!
3) Highlight the benefits employees are bringing to the company
The benefits of getting employees sharing company posts and media can be exponential. Any employee active in social media likely has hundreds, if not thousands of followers between all of their different accounts. Now, imagine what this could mean to your business exposure…
It is highly likely that employees’ LinkedIn connections are like‐minded or in the same field of business, making your company’s content relevant to a wider reach. It is simply too large of a potential audience to ignore!
As a result of reaching a wider audience, the company’s brand awareness and reputation is boosted as well. The best thing about it is that it is nicherelated growth, therefore the perfect target for you!
4) Outline Profile and Engagement Expectations
While allowing employees to autonomously and uniquely share brand content, it’s important to educate employees about the brand’s social goals and strategies.
Here are some tasks you might want to ask your employees to do:
Optimize Personal Profiles
It’s essential to suggest them to update their profile with a company and job description. The point here is not to limit or restrict how and when they share information about the brand, but to ensure that the brand’s social presence maintains a unified voice and consistently targets the correct audience.
You’ll probably need to walk employees through how to optimise their LinkedIn profiles. Show them how to:
- Add or change their profile picture
- Set the correct industry description
- Update the Summary section and add rich media
- Update the Experience section
- Link their current position to the LinkedIn company page
- Update and optimise their contact information
Expand Personal Networks
As a brand, you likely have a huge network of followers at your disposal, in the form of the followers of each of your employees. Even though every follower of every employee is not going to be a potential prospect, it is still hugely worth spreading the social bug to your employees so they can help spread your brand’s content.
And they don’t have to be spammy. They know their connections better than anyone, therefore they can go precisely to a specific group of people from their list of connections who could be potential customers.
Tip: Not all your employees are going to be willing to take this step; but this can be particularly relevant for your company’s sales department.
Endorse Coworkers
Ask your employees to support and recommend their coworkers for skills applicable to your industry using the endorsement function in LinkedIn.
Connect With Company Pages and Groups
Provide instructions that make it easy for employees to follow your LinkedIn operation, provide a list of links for them to use. Ask them to click the Follow button on Company and Showcase Pages, or the Join Group button on any groups your company manages.
Publish Company Content
Make sure you have enough content to keep the company program growing. Some of your employees may be committed sharers in the beginning but then start to abate. You could ask program participants to add a brief memo or guide that could be distributed with some suggestions and key information.
Here are some content ideas to get you started:
- Blog post shares
- Company updates
- Meet the team posts
- Testimonials
- Hiring announcements
- Press releases
Crafting content that would be accepted and enjoyed by the brand’s employees may be a very good starting point for creating engaging and interesting content for the readers. This is an important thing to consider when creating social content.
Because it can work the other way around, too. If it interests the employees, then it will likely be of interest to the target audience.
In conclusion, if you cannot get your content shared through social channels, it is not going to be of much help. The spread of content via social media doesn’t have to be left to chance. All the things you’ve just read will make it very easy, and therefore more likely, for employees to help with social networking through LinkedIn and allow good content to spread n a modern version of word-of-mouth marketing.
With a LinkedIn engagement program you empower employees! So, put a plan into place and start encouraging social sharing ASAP.
Need help coming up with a digital strategy for your online business? Check this out.