Brands cannot truly succeed in social business through marketing and social media team activity alone. A brand's employees play the key role in establishing, amplifying, and nourishing the social identity of the organization. And to make things more challenging, the line between personal versus professional identity is becoming blurred as individual employees focus on activating their personal brands.

Utilizing your brand voice to motivate employee action, increase trust, and shape your organization's culture of content requires action. Brands interested in earning the authentic reach employees provide should focus on the following:

Creating content that can be shared.

Providing success stories on socially shared content.

Instituting systems of measurement to inform direction.

Statistics

• LinkedIn posts with links have a 200% higher engagement rate. (socialpilot.co)

• 77% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media. (MSLGroup)

• Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs. the same messages shared via official brand social channels. (MSLGroup)

Take Aways

1. Visual content inspires employee action and content engagement. By providing employees with marketing content that is engaging and visually interesting, employees (like customers) are likely to be more interested in sharing and engaging with the brand content. Embrace the creation of content types such as video, infographics, SlideShare and other rich media that tell your story in an authentic and transparent way.

2. Make it easy for employees to opt into activation. Embrace technology to automate, amplify and measure the content distribution process. There are many social tools in the market that provide easy publication paths for employees interested in activating and enhancing their own social identities. Make sure your tools are both desktop and mobile enabled to allow employees access in context of their work day. 

3. Provide your employees with training to assist them in growing their personal influence. Employ training resources to assist employees in optimizing their social profiles, growing and deepening their networks, becoming original content creators, and engaging in communications that expand from online to offline behaviors.

4. Assist the executive team to lead by example. The trepidation felt by many employees can be overcome by seeing the executive team embracing social business and demonstrating their successes and challenges. In fact, executives have many of the same concerns about activation of their social identities as employees. Through transparent communication and storytelling about what has worked and where the bumps in the road have been for executives, the forward momentum needed to activate employees social brands will be influenced.