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We all know how important it is to get our quality content noticed on social media. Posting and re-posting content — your own or that of other expert sources — can raise brand awareness and help establish your company as an industry thought leader.
But getting promoters and influencers to re-tweet and re-post your articles as much as you’d like can be a difficult, time-consuming and expensive proposition. How can you gain more influencer and promoter attention, thereby reaching a larger audience, but using less time and budget?
Simple. Just use a resource that every enterprise already has: your employees.
Social media reach increases through employee sharing
Decreasing brand reach is the nemesis of digital marketers. Consider that the average Company Page post on Facebook may reach two to six percent of followers at best. Yet studies of social media algorithms prove that one-on-one social media conversations have more value than brand conversations.
Empowering employees to share company messages is a simple way to combat the pay-to-play environment for brands looking to increase organic reach on social media channels. It’s fair to say that because employee posts are shared in a one-to-one conversation with personal friends and followers on social media, employee posts have farther organic reach than company posts.
Employee advocacy humanizes your brand
In the B2B tech space, we are always looking for opportunities to bring a human element to our clients’ brands. Social media marketing is relationship marketing. But motivating employees to share company content on their personal social media channels puts a face to your company. This is known as activating employees as social media advocates.
From the CEO to the sales team, there are advantages to employees sharing company content on their personal social media channels. When employees share your company’s quality content on their personal social networks, they are positioning themselves as credible influencers in the industry. This can establish trust among potential customers and ultimately impact the bottom line.
How B2B tech companies can benefit
At Idea Grove, we’re using a tool called GaggleAMP to complement our existing social ambassadorship strategies. GaggleAMP makes sharing easier and more scalable, especially for companies who are growing their employee base quickly.
Our client Pivot3, an Austin-based hyperconverged infrastructure company, began activating employees as social media advocates in the fall of 2016. We used a phased approach to motivate Pivot3’s marketing team to share customized social media posts using GaggleAmp.
We started out using the marketing team as a pilot group, knowing we’d get a better ROI with this team. We encouraged the team to share custom social media posts — both branded and unbranded thought leadership content — via their personal accounts. After hitting our target sharing goals with this team, we moved on to Phase II, rolling out GaggleAMP to the sales team, executive leadership and even the board of directors. By all these employees sharing thought leadership posts as individuals, it not only promoted brand content on Pivot3’s website, but also positioned their team as thought leaders in the industry.
Activating employee advocates has directly contributes to Pivot3’s larger company objectives. Currently there are more than 100 Pivot3 employees sharing content daily. The Pivot3 brand has seen a 240 percent increase in social media reach and 100 percent increase in social media engagements, quarter over quarter. This increase in brand awareness helps position Pivot3 as a leader in a fragmented and crowded HCI market online. We’re also able to make a direct correlation between the number of organic social media leads and the number of employees sharing content on their personal social networks each day.
In short, by encouraging your employees to be social media advocates for your brand, you can expand the reach of your company’s voice online. In doing so, you also create new opportunities to connect with potential customers, partners and industry influencers through increased social media reach and engagement.
Learn more
We’re headed to Boston June 15-16 for GaggleAMP’s AMPlify conference. To see our journey and learn more about how to leverage employees and stakeholders as a part of your digital marketing strategy, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @IdeaGrove.
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