Employees - LinkedIn's secret sauce to content distribution

Way back in 2013, Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy at Buzzfeed coined the line: "If Content is king, then Distribution is queen - and she wears the pants". The idea being how you distribute your content is often more important than the content itself.

On LinkedIn, there are essentially three strategic ways to distribute content. Like all other social channels, you have the option of Organic posting and Paid posting. But on LinkedIn, you have a third option - Employees as a potential distribution channel. In this article, I'll explore the pros and cons of all three and why Employees should be a key consideration when looking to reach audiences on LinkedIn.

Organic

Organic distribution is when a brand publishes content on their LinkedIn Company or Showcase page without using paid tactics to promote it. It has one key advantage - it's free.

On LinkedIn, publishing organically from your Company page is the most common distribution tactic and it can be a viable one for marketers with a limited / no budget. However, organic posting comes with limitations in primarily three ways:

• You have no control. The algorithm controls who sees the content
• Lack of targeting means you will struggle to reach the right people
• Audience relevance - Company page followers are likely not your target audience for your content

There are a number of great posts out there about LinkedIn's algorithm and if organic posting is your primary tactic for distribution, it is worth informing yourself on how it works. LinkedIn's engineers publish a blog on it every year and Allen Gannett from TrackMaven did a great presentation on the LinkedIn algorithm at Content Marketing World earlier this year (paywall). There are definitely ways smart marketers can leverage the algorithm to their advantage when distributing content organically. However the big con with organic posting on LinkedIn (or any other social channel) is that you relinquish control of who and how it reaches your audience.

To quote Gannett in his presentation "when you create a piece of content, the LinkedIn algorithm immediately predicts how high quality it thinks it is" and this is determined by the history of the content you've been publishing on the Company page as well as the rate in which your Company page followers engage with it. It is the algorithim that controls whether your content will be successful or not.

In short, you are handing over control of the reach and performance to your audience with the hope that they will share/amplify it and that their friends/network/connections will also share it - go viral. These engagements are vital signals that influence the algorithm to promote it further or not. Below is a diagram of the LinkedIn algorithm at work.

So, if the organic algorithm uses follower engagements signals to make the content more visible, the second big issue with organic posting is obtaining those engagements with members who find it relevant. With organic distribution the only members who see your content initially are those who follow your Company page and this can be a problem.

Let's pause here and think about the Company pages you currently follow on LinkedIn. They tend to your own company's page and the pages of companies where you want to work. Indeed, the likely reason someone follows your Company page is to get a job at your company, not to buy your products. If you follow Coca Cola's LinkedIn page, it's not because you want to buy a can of Coke, but because you want to work there or want to be informed about the company's values and movements. Therefore, Company page followers on LinkedIn tend to be current and future employees or investors - not necessarily customers. So if you are marketing a product with the goal to generate customer leads, posting organically on your Company page is not the best tactic because it is likely not reaching your customer audience.

The intent behind a follower of your page is often to get a job at your company, not to buy your products.

In addition, if you've invested a lot of money in creating the content, you want to give it the best chance possible to reach the people you want to see it. Allowing your followers and the algorithm to decide whether or not it should be amplified is a half-baked strategy. Take control of your distribution with paid, even if it is to at least kick start the initial campaign and if the content is good enough earned eyeballs will take over.

Paid

Paid distribution is when a brand uses paid ad space on the social media feed to target and reach their relevant audience. Holistically, the basic benefit of paid distribution is you maintain control over who sees the content.

This is done through targeting. Targeting ensures the content reaches people who will find the message relevant, not just your Company page followers. It is perhaps most important for brands to use paid distribution for action oriented, demand gen content (aka bottom of funnel). While your top of funnel content usually has a broader audience in mind, so a combination of organic and some paid might be helpful to push content like thought leadership or emotional pieces. This is generic advice and won't be suitable for every case; but leveraging paid tactics on social media is usually the best way to ensure your content reaches your relevant audience.

On LinkedIn, Sponsored Content is the primary way to reach your target audience in the feed. That said, we often see brands over-compensate with their targeting. They go too niche (we call it hyper-targeting) which in-itself can be an ineffective distribution tactic as the smaller the target audience gets, the higher the price of the CPC, the more limited your reach. Hyper-targeting literally generates a scenario that creates less leads at a higher cost. This is why we generally recommend using paid distribution to intelligently target broad.

Hyper-targeting literally generates a scenario that creates less leads at a higher cost.

Take a spectrum approach. If you are a B2B company, on the left end of the spectrum you have extremely broad targeting - say everyone on planet Earth. And on the right end you have super-niche targeting, just CXOs of Fortune 50 companies.   

Most brands use paid to target too far towards the right (their core customer base), but if they broadened the targeting a bit, they would enjoy the benefits of lower costs, greater reach and greater sales.  

To be clear, it’s not that B2B marketers should target everyone with paid distribution, it’s that instead of hyper-targeting CXOs in specific industries at specific company sizes, find the happy medium. Most B2B buying decisions are done by committee and research shows those committees are expanding all the time. It’s not just the CXO signing off on any business decision, it’s a huge army of cross-functional partners. In tech, for instance, 18 different people are signing off on any business decision. So using paid to hyper-target the CXO is as ineffective as organic posting on your Company page. Use paid and targeting to control the messaging to the people who influence the CXO and who make the recommendations on what vendor to choose. 

And the only way to do that is with fairly broad, but intelligent targeting. Again, not no-targeting, but not hyper-targeting, find the happy middle that keeps lead acquisition high but paid distribution costs reasonable.

Employees

Leveraging employees as a distribution channel is the secret sauce of LinkedIn. Using your employees on LinkedIn is a fantastic content distribution tactic for a couple of very important reasons.

• Like organic, it's free (unless you are using LinkedIn Elevate)
• Like paid, your employee's connections reach a far more relevant audience than your Company page followers
• People trust other people, more than they trust brands
• Employees as a distribution tactic is fairly unique to LinkedIn

Let's do a simple exercise. How many LinkedIn connections do you personally have? Then multiply that by the number of employees your company has. It's a big number, right? Now, compare that number to the number of followers on your Company page. Our research shows that employees have 5-10X more connections than Companies have followers. You suddenly begin to see the reach and scale potential of using your employees to share content than just organically posting on your Company page.

As mentioned earlier, most of your company page followers are not customers, they are future employees or investors. However, the demographic make-up of your employee's LinkedIn connections (say just the connections of your sales teams) would look very different. In fact, your sales teams are reaching out and connecting to the same potential customers you are trying to reach with your content. The LinkedIn connections of your sales teams are far more relevant than those on your Company page.

In addition, your sales teams already have established personal / human relationships with these potential customers. It is likely that bond between an employee and their connections is stronger than the bond between the company and their company page followers. It's a more human side to LinkedIn and because people trust people more than brand communications we see employee shares generate a 2X higher click-through rate (CTR) than company shared posts.

Imagine if you organised your sales teams to help distribute your company's content to their connections. The potential for your campaigns to reach a large volume of the relevant audiences with a warm connection to your brand is an enticing one and a distribution tactic that is not explored enough by brands.

Your employees are truly the secret sauce of the LinkedIn platform when it comes to distribution. LinkedIn is also the only social media platform you can manage this distribution in an organised way through a tool we call LinkedIn Elevate. In fact, if you are reading this post on LinkedIn, it is highly likely it reached you via Elevate and your connection with a LinkedIn employee who shared it.

What about 'Earned'?

Earned is normally attributed to the content itself earning engagement based on its relevancy, value and own merit. We all want content that does this but earned, however, is not a distribution tactic. It is a symptom of a great distribution strategy and great content. You cannot rely on earned engagement if you do not have the correct strategy for distribution in place. Overall, a potential distribution strategy that leverages all three tactics of Organic, Paid and Employees is a good start to help you see success and perhaps greater earned engagements.

Use organic distribution to push out your brand communications about jobs and company values (like Corporate Social Responsibility, employer branding and investor news); use paid to broadly target the relevant buying committee and the actual decision makers helping you generate mid and bottom funnel opportunities; and use employees to scale your brand reach and engagement exponentially to both new and existing pastures. Employees will also assist in building trust and relevance towards funnel funnel objectives. As you become more informed about what is working best, look to optimize.