Why Your Staff Should be Front and Centre of Your Social Media

Employee advocacy is one of the developing themes this year on social media, so how can we leverage our staff base to amplify and advocate for our policies, for our positions and for the decisions we are taking? 

Did you know that when a member of staff actually publishes content it has six times more resonance than a corporate message. 

It's really time that we began to empower and encourage our employees to be that subject matter voice that they are within the organisation and indeed very often that they are in traditional media. 

You have the subject matter experts within your organisation, leverage their expertise, leverage their knowledge and all of that knowledge is content that can be repurposed into multiple formats for the social web from video to audio to visual storytelling to long-form text content. 

A great example was shared by Simon Swan who spoke at the Public Sector Digital Marketing Summit and he talked about digital transformation from within. They had an aspiration and a goal to really take on and to be the go-to trusted source for all things weather in the UK, but they realised that weather was now being used as content by many other facets and organisations and individuals in society, and they had become their competitors if you like. 

But before they try to increase their profile online externally, they actually took a look inside their organisation, their staff, and meteorologists and scientists and research became the faces and the voices of their content and what they were completely surprised about was that the public loved it, they loved hearing the detail, they wanted more than a 30-second weather bulletin that they were getting in traditional media, they were really keen on the detail and on the data, they weren't overwhelmed by the scientific nature of the information that their meteorologists were sharing. 

They said that when they were convinced and they empowered and they gave some training to their experts internally, they then had much more leverage when they wanted to increase their profile and their influence online among the public. 

So who do you have within your organisation that can make an impact, that can have a conversation with the public on any digital channel? 

Who are you using? 

Who are you presenting in media interviews? 

Can they become another social spokesperson? 

Do you have social reporters within your organisation? 

Who's going front of screen when you are engaging in stories? 

Or are engaging in IGTV videos or youtube videos? 

Who are the faces? 

People connect with other people, they don't want to hear from a corporate voice anymore, they want to get to know who are these people that have the expertise and that will also of course build trust, build respect, build transparency and then your public will become advocates for you. 

So this year have a look within your organisation; 

Who are the subject matter experts? 

Who can you bring to be extra faces of your organisation online?

Joanne Sweeney

Public Sector Marketing Institute