Social media allows B2B marketers to bring decision makers into your brand’s ”Sphere of Influence.” There, you’ll build long term personal and business relationships that will eventually lead to sales. But it takes time.

When I look at a company’s social media strategy, I tend to look at how they engage their audiences via:

• Branded social channels
• Employee advocacy
• External influencers

Much has been written on how to manage branded social media communities. Your job as a social media manager is to inspire, entertain and educate an audience via those branded accounts on an daily basis. It’s not your job to sell. Unless, we’re talking about paid social media campaigns.. but we’re not.

Influencer marketing has peaked this year as a tactic many companies in all kinds on industries are focusing on. It makes sense, as they can amplify your brand message exponentially. Unfortunately, this is often a step too far for many companies and can also be rather costly.

Employees, on the other hand, are your first line of brand advocates. Why else would they work for your company, if they didn’t believe in what you’re trying to achieve? Their motivation to “be more social” may come from being true believers or having to meet a sales target.

Your employees are experts at what they do and they often have existing professional connections with potential customers or external influencers, so they are perfectly placed to build online relationships that will help get your brand message across.

This chart from Edelman Trust Barometer 2019, confirms what many of us already knew: the company technical experts are the most valuable employees in terms on social media influence. Having worked in the IT industry for over 20 years, I have first hand proof of this! According to this chart, people even rate the technical experts and regular employees as even more credible than the CEO!

Quick start to employee advocacy:

• The easiest way for employees to get involved is to have them retweet or share what is already on your branded social accounts. Tag them in the posts and ask them to comment and share it with their connections.
• Create social media content kits for your employees. Simple documents with social posts for LinkedIN and Twitter that are on brand, on message, with a relevant link to your website and a graphic or video. A bit more work, but worth it.
• Get your employees on video to support your marketing campaigns. They tell your story in a personal way and social is all about that human dimension. Videos are so much more powerful and engaging than static images. You can even do them at no cost via your smartphone. Help your employees, though, as you don’t want them to get it horribly wrong.. Here at Crowdfluence, we have training and best practices you can leverage.

Taking employee advocacy to the next level:

• Invest in an employee advocacy tool. There are many to choose from, such as LinkedIN Elevate, Everyone Social, Bambu by Social Sprout, Smarp and many more.
• Thought leadership programmes, highlighting your technical team’s prowess or vision of your executives. That’s another blog post..
• Online roundtables (Crowdchats) to involve employees in two-way discussions with customers and influencers to amplify your campaigns.

Successful B2B marketers must think about using social media to connect business to person and use employees can help amplify your existing communication and targeting strategies to build meaningful and long-term relationships with your target audience.