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Are your employees on LinkedIn?
Do they share your company’s content with their networks?
Asking your employees to promote your company content on LinkedIn is a great way to reach more prospects and increase visibility.
In this article I’ll explain how to help your employees share your content on LinkedIn.
#1: Promote the Program
The first step to starting a LinkedIn employee engagement program is to find and appoint a leader. Look for someone from marketing who’s enthusiastic about LinkedIn and excited about this program. You’ll want to choose a passionate leader who can motivate your employees and get them excited to participate.
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Once you’ve established a leader, get a couple of employees on board before rolling out the program to the rest of your staff. Later on, after you work out the bugs and streamline the processes, these employees can promote the program and encourage others to participate.
Now you’re ready to launch the program to everyone.
#2:Â Communicate the Goal
First, explain and outline your company’s current digital marketing efforts and what it takes to get followers for your social media channels.
Then, make it clear that the program’s overarching goal is for all employees to attract new followers and customers by representing the company as a cohesive team.
Finally, create a short but powerful mission statement that will engage employees in helping you to achieve the goal of your LinkedIn Employee Engagement Program.
#3: Highlight Participant Benefits
To get your employees’ buy-in, share why their participation can benefit them personally and professionally. For example, the program can increase exposure to potential customers, drive more leads and increase sales, possibly resulting in higher bonuses or profit-sharing.
Additionally, participating in the program can enhance your employees’ personal profiles, activities and visibility on LinkedIn, and they’ll be seen as industry professionals. And it may even improve their reputation within the industry your company serves.
#4: Outline Profile and Engagement Expectations
Spend some time going over what you expect from employees who take part in the program. Keep in mind that you don’t want to overload them with too much extra work.
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Here are some tasks you might want to ask them to do:
Optimize Personal Profiles
It’s important that employees have a complete and professional-looking LinkedIn profile. Ask them to update their profile with a company and job description (which may come from marketing).
You’ll probably need to walk employees through how to optimize their LinkedIn profiles. Show them how to:
- Claim a vanity URL.
- Add or change their profile picture. A professional-looking profile image goes a long way toward making the right first impression on LinkedIn.
- Set the correct industry description.
- Update the Summary section and add rich media (especially if your company produces high-quality videos and other rich media).
- Update the Experience section.
- Link their current position to the LinkedIn company page (thus increasing your company’s LinkedIn page rank in organic searches on Google).
- Update and optimize their contact information.
Expand Personal Networks
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Share how together as a team you’ll be able to reach hundreds or thousands of people who may be interested in reading and engaging with the company’s content. The larger their personal networks, the better.
Provide instructions on how and why your staff should connect with fellow employees, customers, partners, prospects and so on. Explain how this will help expand the reach of your company’s content on LinkedIn.
You might share an example like the following:
“Say that 20 employees in the program have 200 connections. This means that potentially 4,000 people could see and engage with our content if we shared and promoted it. Even if only a small percentage of these 4,000 people share, like or comment on our content, the content is still dramatically extending beyond its original posting.”
Endorse Co-workers
Ask employees to endorse and recommend their fellow colleagues for skills applicable to your industry.
Connect With Company Pages and Groups
A lot of the content that you want employees to like, share and comment on will be posted to your LinkedIn company page, showcase pages and groups.
To make it easy for employees to follow your LinkedIn entities, 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 to get notified when new content has been posted.
Ask employees to follow your LinkedIn company page and showcase pages.
Publish Company Content
The most challenging and important part of the program can be keeping it going. This is where most LinkedIn employee engagement programs fail. You don’t want to have engaged employees and no content to share. Make sure you have a funnel of content to keep the program growing.
Finally, it’s important you ask employees to share the company’s capabilities and content (articles, videos, press releases and so on) with their LinkedIn networks.
Some of your employees may be highly engaged sharers in the beginning but then start to taper off. You’ll need to actively monitor, drive and manage the program.
If you ask program participants to put one or two share reminders each week on their calendar, that actually works sometimes. Or better yet, put reminders on their calendars for them.
Conclusion
With a LinkedIn employee engagement program, you can tap into your colleagues’ networks to increase brand visibility, ramp up lead generation efforts, improve your SEO and publish content on LinkedIn that reaches more of your target audience.
What do you think? Have you started your own LinkedIn employee engagement program? What types of challenges have you faced getting it off the ground? What kinds of successes have you enjoyed? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Benefits photo from Shutterstock.
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