Crawl, Walk, Run: Steps To Turning Employees Into Thought Leaders

Employees are some of brands best advocates. Leading brands are realizing the value in powering their employees to be active in social channels. One of the most frequently asked questions about employee advocates is “will my employees really share?” The answer is yes, employees that love your company are happy to share.

One thing to realize however, is that employees will all having differing levels of comfort when it comes to sharing on social media. While some employees might be happy to posting and sharing right off the bat, others (and perhaps most) may be a bit more hesitant.

Companies should embrace a crawl, walk, run approach to employee sharing, striving to help employees move from sharing pre-populated text to ultimately curating and creating their own content.

Crawl: One-click sharing of thought leadership content that is pre- populated by the brand or automatically populated with the title of the article

Walk: Use the pre-populated content provided and customize it. Add new hashtags, @ your potential buyers and connections, etc.

Run: Create and curate your own thought-leadership content and share across your personal or business owned channels.

As employees share more and become more confortable sharing they will move from crawl to walk to run. Additionally it’s important that companies provide employees with everything they need to be successful

Tips for success:

Provide content employees want to share. While this sounds obvious, it’s easy to forget. It is critical to put yourself in your employees shoes to determine if the piece of content is really worth sharing. Would you share it yourself? If the answer is no – then it’s definitely back to the drawing board.

Make it EASY. Again this one is another no brainer; however because it is so critical to getting employees to share in social that it must be mentioned. Some ways companies can make it easy for employees to share by providing a centralized place for brand content so that they can easily share and create content.

Help them get started. One way to encourage advocates to create short-form or long-form content is to give them a prompt to help them get started. Many employees want to share but have a difficult time thinking of what to say. By pre-populating text for your employees you can help take out some of the guess work for your employees making it easier for them to share.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1mGd6gd