Posting content on social media platforms as a business can be tricky.
You often walk a fine line between wanting to promote your business on marketing channels but not wanting to sound like you’re relaying a direct sales pitch.
Employee Generated Content (EGC) can help you avoid this over-selling pitfall, while delivering an authentic message to your audience.
Your Employee Generated Content can take various forms including blog posts, social media updates, videos, podcasts, and more. The idea behind EGC is to leverage the unique perspectives and expertise of your existing employees to enhance your organisation’s communication and marketing efforts.
What is Employee Generated Content (EGC)?
Put simply, EGC is any form of content created by your employees. But why is it so important?
Well, people deal with people, so by building some of your content around your business and your people, you can make your brand more authentic and relatable to your current clients and prospective leads. Company culture and employee advocacy are important aspects to prospective leads, so sharing Employee Generated Content is a brilliant idea. A study by Post Beyond shows 90% of consumers say authenticity is important when they’re deciding on which brands to support.
By harnessing the power of Employee Generated Content, your company can create a more dynamic and inclusive environment as well as tap into the diverse talent amongst your team and gain the perspectives of your workforce.
Planning & Strategy Are The Keys to Your Success
Without proper planning your Employee Generated Content is not going to automatically be a social media goldmine bringing in the leads you want. However, with a little planning by your marketing team and the right strategy, you will give yourself a much greater chance of success.
Key aspects you should consider when planning your EGC are:
- Put Someone in Charge of EGC
- Brainstorm Ideas as a Team
- Analyse Your Post Data
- Use The Right Tools
- Drive Engagement
Put Someone in Charge
If you want your social media content to engage with your audience and align with your brand, you are going to need to put someone at the helm of your EGC ship. Your content will lose the power of EGC without a key person to plan, schedule, review, and hold the team accountable. Of course, your content will need to be checked by your key person to ensure brand consistency.
A key part of putting someone in charge is to bring an element of consistency across all your social media content. This allows your business narrative to be communicated throughout all your posts and leads to greater credibility with your customers.
Brainstorm Ideas as a Team
When it comes to generating engaging content for your audience, it helps to get your whole team on board. Getting their creative juices flowing can help you uncover a wealth of new content ideas. Encouraging employees to help with content will make them feel more invested in your company and they’ll quickly become your brand advocates as they embrace the company values, your company’s mission, and create content aligned to your target audience/s.
Here are a few ideas you can focus on to get started:
- Information and stories about your business
- The value you bring to your customers
- Success stories and testimonials
- Educational information
- Unique selling points
Not only does a team effort make for more ideas, but your employees are also the ones who will inevitably be crafting or even appearing in the content. So, getting them on board at the very beginning makes sense.
Analyse Your Post Data
Now that you are creating quality Employee Generated Content, it is really important to check that your business is actually benefiting in the long term.
Listed below are the key types of data you can look at to measure your social media posts:
- Vanity metrics: reactions, comments, and shares (what looks good)
- Sanity metrics: engagement and insights (what is good for business)
- Humanity metrics: real conversation (what is going to generate leads)
Driving real conversation is what Employee Generated Content is all about; engaged employees sharing valuable insights to ultimately produce leads for your business.
Use The Right Tools
Without professional graphic design tools, your social media content can easily get lost among peoples’ newsfeed. The good news is, you don’t need a degree in design or to pay for any complicated software with the user-friendly content creation tools below, each of which offer free options:
- Canva: an easy to use online graphic design platform, with hundreds of thousands of templates to choose from. With Canva, you can quickly create eye-catching media for your social posts.
- Evernote: an application that allows you to add visual elements to highlight areas of an image or text where you would like to draw your audience’s attention.
- Infogr.am: a great infographic creation tool if you want to communicate any kind of data. It creates an eye-catching infographic that visually looks more presentable than standard graphs and tables.
- Piktochart: another tool that allows you to create engaging infographics rather than post text-heavy content that social media users will scroll right past.
Drive Engagement
What is your desired result?
This is the key question you need to ask when it comes to EGC. Understanding your audience and what drives them is important in creating EGC that will win your audience’s attention and interest.
A content calendar can help you align your objectives and goals, as well as define what content you are going to create and when you are going to post it. Knowing the best times to post and what content drives better engagement is going to help you create better content for your audience.
Conclusion
Like anything in life, your level of success is directly related to the planning and strategy you applied at the beginning. Further success and improvement comes from understanding your data and evolving your content from measured results.
Optimise Online are content specialists, we know all too well that memorable and valuable content gains more engagement. High-quality content is essential to your business growth online.
To learn more about EGC and the importance of high-quality content, get in touch with the team at Optimise Online.