The executives at your organization have a great amount of influence, even if their social media reach doesn’t extend that far just yet.
You can still work with this. You can leverage the influence of your executives by propping them up on social media. They will benefit greatly from your employee advocacy program, and you’ll receive their full support and buy-in for your efforts. Once they experience the increase in engagement on their social posts, they’ll want to keep it going and will be your program’s biggest fans.
Here’s what you need to do first.
Content Strategy
You want to supply content for your leadership team. This can be curated third-party content and/or branded content that you create. The key here is you don’t want to treat your executives the same as everybody else. Supply them with different content from the rest of the employees in your Gaggle.
Your executives are knowledgeable about your industry, but they might not feel comfortable being active on social media or just don’t know how to go about it. You are going to enable them to broaden their reach and speak to their target audience by supplying them with relevant content on industry trends and challenges.
Write captions for the content you want them to share, and make sure the captions are written in their voices. This will help them build out their personal brands on social media.
Sometimes executives have assistants that run their social media accounts, so writing marketing-approved captions in the voice of the executives will help the assistants in a big way.
Make sure you enable executives to share posts consistently, so people will know they are active and are a valuable connection.
Use Your Gaggle Members To Bolster Executives’ Social Media Presence
This next step is simple, but not everyone does it.
You have a whole Gaggle full of employees who are willing to advocate for your brand. Once your executives share posts on social media, simply request your Gaggle Members to engage with their posts.
When your employees engage with a post from an executive, it boosts the post up in feeds. Comments and Shares are the most valuable types of engagement, but a simple Like will go a long way as well. This will extend the reach of your executives and get them noticed.
Get Executives Active
Sharing posts is a big part of being active on social media, but another big part is engaging with others.
Recommend important people in your industry for your executives to connect with, whether it be analysts, influencers, or others. Also, make sure your employees connect with your executives to expand their audience and to make sure you’re all part of each others’ networks.
Your executives have their own insights that you should want them to share. Suggest conversions on social media that they should hop into. For example, if you see an analyst in your industry post about a trend or challenge your executives might know a few things about, have them comment on that post and share their insights.
Gamify Your Program
Once your executives start to see the boost in engagement they’ll get from your employee advocacy program, they’ll like being active on social media on their own.
However, another great way to get them motivated to be active in your program is to inject some friendly competition through gamification. With GaggleAMP’s leaderboard, you can let employees know who in your Gaggle is leading the way in your program’s activity. You can even offer prizes to the leaders.
In many companies, there are CMOs and CEOs battling each other for the top spots in their program’s leaderboards. This type of competition leads to more activity in the short-term, drawing in more Members in the long-term, and keeps employees active over a longer period of time. Ultimately, it will boost the organic growth of your program.
Glassdoor Reviews
When people outside of your organization want to learn more about your company, they might turn to reviews on websites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
Some companies have very strong ratings on these types of websites, while others wish their reviews were a bit stronger. The good news is you can use your Gaggle to improve the reviews and ratings on these websites including the approval score of your executives.
Simply send a request to your employees to write reviews on Glassdoor, and they’ll boost your company’s rating and your leadership’s approval score. You can request employees write reviews on Indeed as well.
Executives tend to greatly value sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, so they’ll like that you’re able to boost these ratings.
Your executives will appreciate you propping them up online and will fully support your program because they’ll see the firsthand benefits. Employee advocacy programs that have the full support of leadership tend to last the longest and be the most successful.
Interested in sharing these points with a member of your executive team? Get the one-page document here.