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Imagine this scenario: You're ready to become an inbound marketing machine. You've created an awesome new ebook that will help your business generate tons of leads, and you've readied your social media accounts to promote your new offer. To make sure your new campaign is a hit, you decide to rally the troops. So you send out a calendar invitation for the first meeting to gather your teammates and plan your ebook launch.
No responses.
This is not an uncommon situation, especially for small businesses with limited marketing bandwidth. While everyone on your staff may believe in and even be excited about your new marketing campaign, nobody is really willing to take the time out of their busy schedules to contribute.
To help you encourage internal content sharing, here are 3 great ways to get your team involved:
1. Play a Little Game
If there’s one thing we can learn from FarmVille or Angry Birds, it’s that people love to play games. And if there’s one thing we can infer from Words With Friends, it’s that people love to win. Try making social media promotion a game. Recruit a couple of people to help you get others excited about the game and stir up some of that competitive spirit, and perhaps those previously unwilling teammates will feel motivated to take some time out of their day to help promote your business' content. If they don’t, they’re losing the game. Consider offering some kind of incentive to further motivate people to want to win.
One way to do this is to sign your company up for GaggleAMP. GaggleAMP allows you to create a page for your company where individual users can connect their Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts to share content. A selected head honcho (most likely you if you’re reading this to lure in your co-workers) will add links to stories office workers should be sharing. From there, all your co-workers have to do is occasionally log in and click the share button. If they’re really lazy, there’s even an auto-share button. Just try to avoid auto-sharing all of your updates. Nobody wants to be spammed.
Now, here’s the fun part. You can award a certain amount of points for each post, and also assign a time frame to when the story can be shared. If time is up, the opportunity ends and points are gone! These points get totaled and are used to rank everyone’s gaming into a leaderboard. And trust us, when one employee starts going off about how high she is in the ranks, it will likely push others to get on their game.
2. Motivate Others to Collaborate
HootSuite and CoTweet are a couple of third-party tools that allow you to consolidate your various social media accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) in one place so you can update these accounts all from one tool. Take advantage of team collaboration features within these tools, which allows one owner (again, that’s probably you) to invite people to your company’s connected social media accounts without having to share account passwords.
The owner can then make certain team members managers of certain accounts. Ding ding ding! Here’s your opportunity to approach a teammate and say, “Hey Bill, I really want to up our social media presence. Since you’ve had a wealth of experience discussing X, Y, and Z topics, would you like to manage this section of this social media account?”
3. Distribute Awards & Offer Recognition
The thought of writing a blog post is daunting for some people. These people have never had the opportunity to take all of the amazing industry knowledge and expertise they have acquired over the years and write it down -- let alone share it! Maybe they can talk to prospects and customers all about their industry expertise, pitch beautifully constructed campaigns, and position a new brand like it’s nobody’s business. But when it comes time to translate that experience into words, they get spooked. All the ideas are there, stirring around in their mind--they just need to take a minute and type them out.
Encourage your colleagues to contribute content and share it online by creating a weekly or monthly award for the employee who writes the best blog post that drove the most traffic or leads for the company website. Then award a prize. The prize might even be as simple as recognition in the form of a plaque or a call-out in your internal company newsletter. Decide on the prize based on your company culture.
Now imagine implementing ALL of these options. Encourage everyone to start writing thought-provoking blog posts to increase your content creation. Upload all these stories to GaggleAMP where company employees can earn points for sharing the content with their respective networks. Then make certain team members in charge of overlooking the discussions that sprout on your social media accounts to encourage promotion and collaboration.
What are some other ways you can encourage your co-workers to start creating and sharing content?
Image Credit: Threat to Democracy
