Thought leadership means that you, as an individual, are seen as the knowledge leader in your field. It reflects how influential your thoughts and ideas are in your field.
As a business, one way to grow your thought leadership and establish yourself as a knowledge leader in your field is to help your employees further and showcase their expertise in the eyes of your target audience. You want (yourself and your employees) to be perceived as thought leaders, from gaining a competitive advantage in the market to building trust and credibility.
Employee advocacy programs offer companies many more benefits than just amplifying marketing and sales efforts and claiming visibility online. Employee advocacy is extremely important in helping your employees build their personal brand and ultimately establish themselves as industry leaders.
Here are 4 ways that employee advocacy can do that:
Thought leadership, for the most part, occurs on social media. By extension, that requires aspiring thought leaders to be able to navigate social media platforms.
We all know that not everyone is a content creator, a copywriter, or a social media manager. While some people may feel more comfortable trying things and figuring out how everything works on their own, a large portion of people would rather be trained.
Employee advocacy programs can do that. With campaigns or more formal workshops, community managers can provide tips and best practices for using social media and train employee ambassadors in social media usage. This will, with time, help them navigate this world and feel more confident using those platforms to establish themselves as thought leaders.
Most employee advocacy programs rely on the practice of social sharing, namely, what happens when companies provide content for their employees to share on social media.
Yes, this grants the company a wider reach and enhanced visibility online. Leveraging employee networks can significantly impact those metrics, given that the employee networks are collectively 10 times bigger than the company’s own.
A nice-to-have side benefit, or even another major benefit of social sharing, is that employees get to present themselves as knowledge leaders on company-relevant content and topics and, on some level, knowledge leaders in their industries.
Sharing product and industry insights on social media will, with time, enhance one’s profile and heavily shape one’s personal brand on social media, thus appearing more and more effectively as an influencing presence. Followers and connections on social media will come to perceive employees as knowledgeable sources of information on a specific topic, and they will so be able to grow as thought leaders.
However, mere social sharing alone won’t achieve the results you dream of: what you need is an advanced employee advocacy solution that can also cultivate thought leadership in your ambassador community before pushing it to the outside.
What does this mean concretely? This, for example, entails supporting employees in writing their own content to go along with the articles, podcasts, or what have you that the company itself provides for them to share. This may seem like a trivial thing, but you’d be surprised to know how much time and effort it can take certain people to come up with good enough and convincing copies to post on social media.
An advanced solution like Ambassify allows you to configure several copies to go along with your content when your employees are sharing it. Plus, it will still allow your most creative ambassadors to edit the copy as they see fit and adapt it to their own tone of voice. At the same time, those less confident ambassadors will have the chance to share content stress-free and showcase their expertise and knowledge online while also learning how to write their own content and getting inspired by those options.
Last but not least, thought leadership is also about expanding one’s horizons beyond company-related content. The next step, and something an advanced solution should be able to afford you, is the possibility to import content from trusted, 3rd party sources to also share with your employee ambassadors.
This would have a massive impact on thought leadership efforts, as it allows employees to also share opinion pieces and expert insights from sources outside of one’s company, too. And that, of course, feeds the thought leadership machine.
Whether you’re looking to establish yourself or your employees as thought leaders, the rules of the game are pretty much the same. The benefits abound, and the key to showcasing your expertise to become a knowledge leader is to curate your personal brand with industry- or topic-specific content and engage in online conversations about it.
If you’re looking for a way to support your employee ambassadors’ efforts to become thought leaders and reap its benefits, then employee advocacy solutions like Ambassify should be on your radar. They can play a massive role in supporting your employees’ content production to training and more.