If you build it, they will not come. Successfully executing on a content marketing strategy involves more than content production — it also involves content distribution. Creating a great piece of content doesn’t help your organization much if nobody sees it, so it’s crucial that it gets distributed to your target audience through several avenues to ensure the best possible reach.

As content marketers, we have more than a few tricks up our sleeves to extend the reach of our content:

• We optimize our posts for search engines
• We share our content through owned social channels
• We extend the reach of our social posts with paid ads
• We email our lists
• We build relationships with influencers in hope that we will get backlinks and social shares

These are all fantastic opportunities to extend our content’s reach, but we’re missing one huge, largely untapped, opportunity: employee advocacy.

Why employee advocacy matters

Your employees are natural advocates for your brand. Most of your employees are in the trenches, day after day, talking to your customers and prospective customers. They believe in your company and what you sell and have the knowledge to articulate why to your customers and prospects, as well as to their friends and family.

This represents an enormous opportunity to get your message out because 92% of people trust recommendations from their friends and family, while only 47% trust advertising from brands. Your employees put a face and a personality behind your brand, and can connect with your target audience in a way that you can’t.

Your employees can also extend your reach and may, collectively, even have a bigger reach than your brand. Whether they’re active on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or any combination of social networks, your employees can reach people that your brand can’t.

For these reasons, your employees represent an enormous opportunity to drive real results for your brand — and for your content distribution strategy, in particular. By sharing your content, your employees are backing up what you say, introducing a human element and extending your reach simultaneously.

8 ways to supercharge your content distribution with employee advocacy

The first step to getting employees involved in content distribution is to make it easy for them to find your content. This can be as simple as asking them to subscribe to your blog and follow your social media accounts, or as sophisticated as using a powerful software platform, like Thismoment, or an employee advocacy platform, like SocialChorus.

Once employees have easy access to your content, you’ll find that most employees are happy to help you distribute it, but simply don’t know how. Here are a few ideas for your employees to get started:

1. Share corporate social posts: See what your company is posting on social networks, and engage with it. This could be in the form of a retweet, share, like, or comment — whichever they are most comfortable. This is particularly useful if the employee is connected with your company’s prospects and leads, but can also be helpful if their friends and family members are in your target market (i.e. if you have a consumer product or if many of their friends work in your industry).
2. Post corporate content on your social accounts: Different employees will be on different accounts, so don’t force where they share. Instead, allow each employee to participate in the networks they’re most interested in – whether it is Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram (or any other number of social networks).
3. Add links to your profiles: Update personal social media profiles to include links to company information. For instance, LinkedIn allows up to three links in the contact section of every profile, so employees could add links to your company’s homepage, blog, and/or a marketing resource.
4. Join industry groups: Participate in LinkedIn and/or Facebook groups related to your industry. This should include participating in current discussions, as well as starting new discussions. Just be careful not to be overly promotional, and to add value to the group members, to make the biggest impact. Social media is meant to be social, after all.
5. Participate in Twitter chats related to your industry: Twitter chats are when a group of people gets together at a predetermined time, usually weekly, and use a hashtag to hold conversations about a specific topic. For instance, the Content Marketing Institute hosts a chat every Tuesday to discuss topics related to content marketing. These chats are a great opportunity to engage with people who may not already be in your network.
6. Reach out to prospects and customers with relevant content: This works particularly well for salespeople who have regular conversations with your prospects and customers and know exactly what kinds of content they would find most interesting. For instance, if a sales rep knows that a particular lead wants to know how they can measure the ROI of a product like yours, they can share a piece of content that speaks to the person’s interest.
7. Answer Quora questions related to your industry: Quora is a question and answer site that people use to share knowledge with one another. Employees can subscribe to the topics that interest them, and answer questions that your prospects are asking. When appropriate, they can even link to more information on your company website or blog.
8. Write content for your company: Your employees are on the front lines every day, talking to customers and answering questions — imagine all the content that could produce! Don’t worry if your employees are not “bloggers” — just get their ideas down on paper and polish it, if need be.

How to know if your employee advocacy program is working

As a smart content marketer, I assume you’re already tracking your success — which gives you a good baseline to understand if your employee advocacy program is working. If you’re not doing this on a regular basis — it’s never too late to start! Some good things to track are traffic, reach, share of voice, company social connections, leads and sales.

If you want to get a clear picture of your program’s success, your employees should be using tracking URLs on content they share so you can attribute success correctly. If you’re not familiar with this, learn about what they are and how to create them on this Google help article. From there, you can see exactly which employees are contributing to your success, as well as look at the program as a whole. However, you can still get a good idea of success, even without this extra step, by measuring net improvements.

Do your employees help you promote content? If so, how?

The post Supercharge Your Content Distribution With Employee Advocacy appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Lists are one of the best Twitter features, yet one of the most underutilized. Without Twitter lists, my Twitter feed is a disorganized mess of information covering all of my interests. I build lists ranging from marketing to recruitment, technology, world news and sports (ok, sports don’t interest me, but the feed does help me hold a decent conversation with my husband!). I highly recommend using Twitter lists  to improve content marketing.

Twitter lists allow me to create separate spaces for each of my interests, so I can find the information I want, when I want to find it.

Today, I’m going to show you how Twitter lists will improve content marketing strategy. But, let’s start with the basics.

What are Twitter lists?

A Twitter list is a way to group Twitter users together so that you have a feed of tweets from just that group.

Example: Let’s say you’re a content marketer in the travel industry who has a particular interest in fashion. You can create separate Twitter lists for content marketing, travel, and fashion, which would allow you to see the specific type of content you want to see, when you want to see it.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to someone else’s list if you like the grouping they’ve put together.

How to create Twitter lists

Click the profile icon in the top navigation and click Lists.

Then, click the button that says Create new list.

Name your list, give it a description if you’d like (this part is optional), and choose whether you’d like your list to be public or private. If you want people to know they’re on the list, and allow others to subscribe to it, make it public. Otherwise, make it private.

Once you’ve created your Twitter list, you can add people at any time from their profile. Just click on the “gear” icon, click “add or remove from lists,” to add that person to specific lists.

And that’s it!

3 ways Twitter lists improve content marketing

1. Brainstorming content. I have industry-specific Twitter lists with bloggers, journalists, influencers, and enthusiasts, to help me keep a pulse on what people are talking about. These lists are often the inspiration for many of my content marketing projects, from blog posts to webinars, infographics, and eBooks, I can see what topics are resonating with my target audience and what gaps I can fill with my unique perspective.

I can also keep an eye out for questions people are asking on Twitter, and answer them through an original piece of content. Sometimes, 140 characters just won’t cut it if I want to provide a great response. Plus, if someone is asking the question on Twitter, chances are someone else could benefit from the answer, which will be more discoverable on my blog.

2. Content curation. Along the same lines of brainstorming content, I often come across content I can curate. For instance, I may find an infographic or video to embed in my content, or an interesting stat that I can hyperlink from a blog post.

I can also gather my favorite content into a weekly “roundup” blog post, where I link to each post and add some content about why I found it interesting.

An added benefit of curating content within your own channels is that when you reach out to inform the original creator that they’ve been featured, they will often share your content on their network, which extends your content’s reach, helping you build a bigger audience.

3. Influencer marketing. In addition to simply listening to social chatter, I also use my Twitter lists to engage with industry bloggers and influencers. I’ll retweet their content, reply to content they share, and answer questions they ask. Once they start to engage, I add them to a second Twitter list for industry bloggers and influencers who engage.

Since I’ve already provided some value to these people, and they have an idea of who I am, I reach out from time to time to see if they’ll help me promote my content. I usually prefer the softer approach where I’ll reply to their tweet with my insights, linking to a post I’ve written that expands on my point-of-view. Often, the influencer will retweet my response and may even link to my post in one of their future posts, helping me increase my content’s reach.

As you can see, I use Twitter lists quite a bit in my content marketing strategy – and love how they help me brainstorm, curate and distribute content. It’s such a great way to filter all the noise from my main Twitter feed and focus only on the tweets I want to see, when I want to see them.

Are you using Twitter lists? If so, how do you use them?

The post 3 Ways Twitter Lists Improve Content Marketing appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.