Glenn is the founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, an employee advocacy and social media management platform.
Here is a problem I find with social media publishing: Too many companies are taking a centralized approach to distributing their content.
Yes, strategy, planning and core content creation can and should be handled by your content and social media marketing teams. But in today’s world, conversations are taking place all over the digital landscape. To reach the most people possible—to find your target audience among the 4.9 billion social media users worldwide—it helps to crowdsource social publishing efforts.
Going Where Corporate Cannot
When you publish content on your company-owned social media channels, do you know who sees it? For the most part, only the people that follow your company page: Employees, partners, customers and prospects on the final leg of their purchasing journey, meaning they have heard of your business and are seeking out content to better understand your brand.
But what about the rest of the market? What about the hordes of potential buyers who haven’t heard of your company yet or who are not yet convinced that your solution is worth exploring? What about the 75% of B2B buyers who are turning to social media to make buying decisions?
As I have discussed in previous articles, dark social channels have exploded, with more than 80% of content shares taking place “behind closed doors,” i.e., private apps, groups, chats, texts and emails that your company cannot see.
If you are taking a centralized approach to social publishing, you will have a harder time reaching people, in general, and particularly in these hard-to-reach spots. Employees, on the other hand, can go where companies cannot. They can join a LinkedIn group or message someone directly to engage in a genuine, human exchange that cannot be replicated by a corporate page.
Centralized Strategy, Not Centralized Distribution
The caveat is that not every employee is going to know how to find and engage your target audience on social media. This is where your social media marketing team has a major impact, by providing the guardrails for employees by creating an official employee advocacy program—a program in which you empower your workforce with the content, tools and knowledge to engage the market on social media.
In this scenario, your marketing communication team is no longer the sole distributor of social media content, but rather, the facilitator of personalized social media engagement at scale.
To drive maximum effectiveness from a decentralized approach to social media publishing, focus on providing the following:
1. Quality Content And Messaging Guidelines
Give people something to share. Help them ignite a discussion by creating a quality content asset and encouraging them to call out one or two takeaways they found most interesting. This allows you to naturally introduce your branded asset into conversations in a genuine, human voice. Meanwhile, your employees get to increase their own visibility in the marketplace and build their personal brand.
Some employees will relish rewriting a marketing message in their tone of voice. For those who are less keen, consider showing them how to use AI tools like ChatGPT to paraphrase content with ease. This will help avoid the all-common parroting problem where a social media network is cluttered with stiff, identical-sounding messages from employees.
2. Breathing Room
Often, I see companies over-instruct, providing so many limitations on social communication that it deters employees from getting involved. I urge you to let go of that mindset. Perhaps an employee is going to choose a phrase you wouldn’t have picked. But their word choice might resonate with someone in a way “marketing speak” would not.
Remember, while social publishing encompasses company-branded social media accounts, employee advocacy targets individual employees’ accounts. You want your employees to feel empowered to get and give ideas in a way that feels honest and real.
In their best forms, social publishing and employee advocacy are used in conjunction with one another. When employees support your core company message, it helps keep your centralized message in the market. Of course, not all employees will elevate your core message, which is okay, too. Even those who stick to the basics will manage to engage more people than your social publishing strategy could on its own. In fact, social publishing in conjunction with an employee advocacy program can increase your organic reach by 200%.
3. Simple, Ongoing Training
Businesses should certainly offer training and education as part of their employee advocacy program. But it doesn’t end with initial training. What supercharges the program is a steady stream of suggested activities that are both timely and relevant. For example, your company can provide a recommended LinkedIn group to join or an influencer’s post on Twitter to read and engage with. The activities that marketing understands intuitively are often lost on rank-and-file employees.
Consider simplifying the management of a program with a platform. Employee advocacy platforms typically include built-in tools, activities and gamification elements to make training fast, consistent and effective.
Nearly every company has a centralized social publishing program. But so many are missing out on a proven way to amplify its impact. I think the tactics of social publishing need to be broadly distributed to have a fighting chance of entering buying discussions.
This doesn’t shrink marketing communication’s role in the process—it enhances it. In addition to overseeing strategy and content creation, marketing is responsible for providing employees the support needed to distribute content and engage a larger audience, thereby improving the company’s social publishing efforts.
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