Word of mouth and referrals have long been some of the most powerful ways for brands and businesses of all sizes to get their message across and reach new customers. No matter if your business consists of a few consultants, or a diverse staff of hundreds or thousands of people, your employees are a natural distribution pipeline for your content. Whether you are already actively publishing content on LinkedIn or just getting started, here are a few simple steps that will help turn your employees into your brand’s biggest content evangelists.
Start a LinkedIn Employee Engagement Program
Everyone in your organization is also a member of many other social media networks and communities. LinkedIn provides a framework to easily reach them, and your employees are like individual gatekeepers to a broader audience. You may already have excellent content, but engaging your staff to get excited about sharing it with their networks will take a little effort.
That’s where a LinkedIn employee engagement program comes in. Think of it as internal influencer marketing for your content. As with any social platform, there will naturally be some members of your organization that are more active and enthusiastic about LinkedIn than others. If you already have a LinkedIn superstar on your marketing team (or anywhere in your organization), start there.
Start Small and Build the Program Up
Some of the benefits of sharing your company’s content on LinkedIn include:
- Increase social media following and engagement
- Attract new customers and leads
- Establish your brand and team members as experts and thought leaders in your field
- Establish trust with your audience
- Increase the audience base and social shares of your content
- Help individual employees and departments reach their sales and marketing targets
According to data, content shared by 3% of employees can yield as much as 30% of engagement. And the No. 1 reason that employees don’t choose to share their company’s content and actively engage and participate in social and content marketing efforts? They simply don’t know about them.
Getting Your Teams Excited and Motivated to Participate in Your LinkedIn Marketing Efforts
A good way to gauge enthusiasm and current engagement levels is to conduct an informal poll of how active everyone is on LinkedIn:
- Is everyone using the platform? (You’d be surprised.) If not, why not?
- Are they active in their networks and constantly growing them?
- Do they currently share company content with their followers?
- Have they fully optimized their LinkedIn profiles?
- How often do they use the platform and what is their main goal in being on LinkedIn?
From attracting leads and prospects to improving SEO, LinkedIn can be something of an untapped resource for many businesses. Polling your organization’s attitudes and usage habits can be a helpful tool in setting up your employee engagement program so that people are excited to participate and can understand the value in taking advantage of what it has to offer.
Set Up Some Guidelines
While the objective is to get your teams excited about the program and to see the benefits of using LinkedIn to share company content with their networks, it is still an extension of your brand and some guidelines should be put in place to ensure professionalism and brand integrity.
A few tips for setting up a professional and successful LinkedIn presence include:
- Use a professional-looking photo (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a studio-quality headshot, but it should be a clear image appropriate for a professional profile)
- Choose a url
- Link to the company page
- Add a thorough and concise job description
- Select the industry
- Make sure the experience section is current
- Update contact information
- Don’t skip the summary section
However, the most important factor in getting your employees on board with your LinkedIn marketing efforts is not to make it seem like a chore or an additional set of obligations on top of their current workload. Consider making it fun by setting up challenges and contests for reaching certain milestones, and build the program up in phases so that it doesn’t become overwhelming.
At the end of the day, people will be more motivated and enthusiastic about sharing content they are excited about and believe in.
