“Connected Leadership is engaging, authentic, and sustained. Connected Leaders embrace digital sources to get closer to employees. They directly engage stakeholders through new forms of communication and on issues beyond the balance sheet. Their connectivity is their resiliency through today’s crises and tomorrow’s.”

Brunswick Group

Of course, in today’s market, it’s not just about managing crises. As part of a well-put-together content strategy, there are many benefits to having an engaging social media presence from staff at the C-suite level. But this also extends to employees at any level in your company. Imagine if everyone in your business, from the interns to the CEO, was posting relevant content on a regular basis. How much bigger would your profile be online and how many more potential star-quality job seekers might you get? How many more high-quality leads might come your way?

If you’re thinking “It’s only social media, what can it possibly do?” then here are some statistics from Social Pilot's 430+ Social Media Statistics You Must Know in 2022 article to consider, just for LinkedIn alone:

There are 180 million senior-level influencers. LinkedIn has 65 million decision-makers and 10 million C-level executives.

55 job applications are submitted per second on LinkedIn.

91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content.

About 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions (managers, VPs, Directors, C-level).

Of course, LinkedIn may not be where you need to be, but the point still applies. Well-executed social sharing by more than just your marketing team can reach the right people and create that all-important excellent first impression.

Business benefits offered by this approach

Here are more benefits for getting your CEO and the rest of your staff involved in social sharing and engagement:

1) Boost your visibility

The more active ambassadors you have out there talking about the company and sharing your content, the more people you reach and the more brand awareness you can raise. You can then gain more social follows, increasing your reach, and drive more traffic to your website with increased visibility.

2) Build your influence and authority

If your C-suite starts to post thought leadership content, your business will begin to build its authority. If you then have all of your employees sharing that message in addition, you amplify your results and get your business point of view across to a much wider audience.

3) Get the attention of senior people

Create content that engages more senior people by using your C-suite and senior managers’ peer network. Depending on how many people you employ, you can increase your reach exponentially, simply by tapping into their networks as well as the company’s own. Your C-suite and senior managers can post excellent content that is exactly what your target market at the senior level wants to hear. This then attracts decision-makers to consume your content and enter your sales funnel.

4) Brand marketing and brand awareness

Thought leadership and brand promotion from the senior team can build brand awareness and promote your company values. Add in employee sharing of the content and you can build a huge wave of awareness that gets your message out there.

5) Humanise your brand

Let your potential customers and recruits see behind the scenes. People can get to know your company culture, and the people making things happen. They’ll feel more of an emotional bond with your business if they feel like they’re being given a view from the inside.

6) Employee satisfaction

Helping people to develop their professional brand and online reputation shows you care about their career development and leadership potential. These are things that employees care about. Employees will also feel more engaged and involved if they’re a part of helping the company grow.

7) Employer branding

Having lots of employees online happy to advocate for your company and acting as ambassadors helps to establish your company as a great place to work. That’s far more convincing than any job ad you could place. From Brunswick Group, “By a more than 5 to 1 ratio, employees prefer to work for a CEO who uses digital and social media. 60% of employees considering joining a company will research a CEO’s social media accounts.”

How to implement social engagement across your business

Before any work can begin on your new content strategy or on personal brand development for employees, it’s important to get senior management onside. Get the senior team and team leaders onboard to encourage sharing and drive the culture change. This is the type of strategy that works best from the top down. Employees will feel more engaged and motivated if you can convince the C-suite and senior managers to back this strategy, to participate, and to speak up enthusiastically for it.

It’s important to think about what each member of the senior team is concerned with. You won’t necessarily convince the finance director that they need to take part by talking about building brand awareness, but you may well do so with good statistics and a demonstration of the potential financial benefits. Tailor your approach individually.

Once you have senior management onboard, you can then turn your attention to convincing your employees of the benefits of social sharing. Present them with the benefits and let them work in a way that’s best for them. You may have a hidden video creation genius among your numbers, but you’ll never know if you insist that everyone only posts written content and infographics.

Bear in mind that this is something that’s in addition to the duties people already have, so it’s got to be enjoyable and easy to do or it will fall by the wayside.

Conversely, work out the best way to reach the senior-level people in your target market before you start posting. If they prefer to listen to podcasts while they’re in the gym, then podcasts are what you need to produce. If they want written content they can read at their leisure, then that’s the way to go. It doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t produce other forms of content, but keep the majority of what you share to the types of content your target audience will appreciate.

In order to make this a success, there are some steps to take to co-ordinate your social sharing:

• Provide all your employees with training on online reputation management. Ensure they have guidelines on what they can say and what isn’t allowed, particularly if you work in a profession where legalities may have a bearing on what you can post.

• Provide everyone with a brand voice guide to help everyone use the same language and tone. Consistent posting across your brand is important to provide the same feel and quality to your posts, no matter who is posting them.

• Help them to provide on-brand content with assets, guidelines, and templated content.

• Encourage everyone to use good keywords, phrases, and hashtags when they post to boost your SEO.

• Help everyone from the CEO down to create great professional social profiles, especially on LinkedIn.

• Encourage employee advocacy. Get them mobilised and amplifying the organisation by sharing the company’s content. They can share direct from your blog, share senior management’s thought leadership posts on LinkedIn, or simply like and engage with existing posts. Everything, no matter how small, adds up over time to create visibility and brand awareness for your company.

• Make sure everyone in the organisation is kept up to date on campaigns and how they can get involved. This won’t work unless everyone is ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Ensure you have regular updates to give everyone help on what to share and the best times to do so for the most impact.

• Provide general social media training for those employees that are the most enthusiastic and having the biggest impact. It can help them do even more.

For your high-profile senior team members, provide them with content creation support. Help them to look good online because everything they do or say reflects your brand.

Again, bear in mind that your senior team already have a very busy day job. Make life as easy for your senior team as possible.

• Provide them with writing assistance for creating an impactful social presence. Ensure that their LinkedIn profile, biographies, and any other social profiles are polished, professional, and reflective of them and your brand. 1827 Marketing has written more leadership LinkedIn profiles for clients than we are allowed to mention.

• Help them to create content for the company blog. They could repurpose recordings of presentations they’ve given. You could interview them on particular topics and post the interview recording and transcript. You, or they, could then create blog posts and white papers from the interviews. If you’re producing content based on their ideas but not written by them, agree your brief upfront, run edits past them, and get their sign-off before you post.

• Get them media training if they want it, so that they feel comfortable appearing on video or podcasts. If they’re keen writers, you could also invest in content writing training for them to polish what they’re already doing and give them new ideas.

• Organise webinars, Q&As, and Ask Me Anything sessions with them. Senior management from your target market is more likely to tune in if they can hear from the C-suite or senior management. However, do support them by creating good scripts, supporting content, and presentation decks for them.

If your teams are doubting that this can really work, here are just some examples of CEOs and other senior-level people who have made a huge success out of this very strategy:

1) Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri uses his own platform to connect with users with product announcements and AMA stories. His posts get a lot of attention, build trust with the company, and increase brand awareness.

2) Richard Branson is a past master at posting on LinkedIn to great acclaim. With almost 20 million followers on that platform alone, it doesn’t take a lot to imagine how many people he can reach with just one post.

3) Mark Coker, CSO of Draft2Digital, formerly CEO of Smashwords, has just short of 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, but he knows his audience and regularly uses Twitter (over 27,000 followers) to keep writers up to date with developments on his platform.

This content strategy can take a bit of effort to set up, but once it is up and running, it can become like a well-oiled machine that keeps on building your brand and increasing your audience. With the obvious impact that can have on your bottom line, it really is a case of why not give it a go?