Once you start contemplating crowdsourcing your content marketing to your employees, you’ll probably start wondering about who on your team will excel at it.
What kinds of employee advocates should you be looking for? What should you consider when cultivating employee influencers?
You can start with the three types of employees your audience already wants to hear from. Those who are already good at social media. Those who can give the mavens in your audience the technical details they crave. And anyone in your company with a “cool” job. We’ll look at each in turn.
1. Employees with Large Followings
When you first try to create employee advocates, you’ll want to look for the people at your company who already have big followings on TikTok or Instagram. They’re personally very successful at social media, but it’s not part of their job. They didn’t list “Twitter Influencer” or “50,000 Facebook Followers” on their resumes.
These people already know how to achieve high engagement on the various platforms. They naturally fit the influencer model. By asking them to apply their knowledge of a particular social channel to the work of promoting their employer, you can inject some lighthearted fun into your social media presence.
These employee advocates will not necessarily post substantive explanations of a new product, but they can make a tweet go viral. Off-topic posts can still boost your brand. Look at Wendy’s or Steak-umm on Twitter.
2. The Engineers and Technicians
Your technical folks may not be good at social media yet, but that shouldn’t stop you from letting them post for you. Actually, you likely already have an audience who wants to hear specifically from them.
Car geeks want to hear from the mechanical engineers who designed the engine in your newest model. Airplane nerds want to know the details about your airfoil testing. Gamers want to hear from the software engineers who designed your latest upgrade. Soap mavens want to hear from the chemical engineers who researched your newest product.
Your technical people can give the mavens and nerds in your audience the inside details on how the smartphone works or how the motor is actually designed and tested. These are buyers you want on your side. They’ll be your best buyers and your best marketers outside of the people who actually work for you. They’re the ones who’ll show off your products to all of their friends. Your engineers and coders can give these people the content they want.
3. Anyone with a “Cool” Job:
Not every company has “cool” jobs. But many companies have careers that sound fun and interesting to the general public.
There are airline pilots, video-game testers (or anyone who tests, for that matter, even taste-testers in chocolate factories), chefs, screenwriters, astronauts, brew masters, pyrotechnicians, demolition crews, movie raters, park rangers, tour guides, event coordinators, sommeliers, and even chauffeurs.
You don’t have to be an airplane nut to want to see a day-in-the-life post by an airline pilot. This is interesting content to the general public, and putting it out there could help grow your social media following.
Don’t Overlook Anyone
Finally, don’t overlook employees who currently don’t fit any of those descriptions. Any employee could turn into excellent employee advocate. With the right tools and management, even with an undeveloped knack for social media, in time they might build a large following.
In other words, all of your employees are potentially good advocates for you on social media. As you experiment with letting them create content for you, you’ll see that some are better than others. You can try to cultivate employee advocates who fit each of these three descriptions. Or you can just wait and see whose content gets the best engagement. By tracking each post, you’ll be able to tell who your best influencers are.
Even if you don’t have any “cool” jobs in your company (which you shouldn’t rule out – you might be surprised what can become cool), you almost certainly have people who fall into the first two categories.
In your initial forays into crowdsourcing your content marketing, start with these two categories. Find a few employees who fit each description. And then sit back and see what they can do.
