What Types of Content Will Employees Share on Social Media?

When I worked in corporate it used to amaze me what awful content I was given to share, it was nothing more than brochures and brochureware, where the message was "buy my product because we are great" which is what everybody says. I knew my audience and network would hate it and actually think it funny if I shared it. It would show what a rubbish company I worked for to think that people who worked for that company, thought people wanted to read a post which was no more than a brochure. It was embarrassing. 

It was amazing talking to to the people who created it, because they themsleves wouldn't read content like that created by any brand, BUT, and it's a big but, they would seem it was OK to throw this stuff out on social, through their employees and we would all be "rich".

At the time, there were three things I didn't know and so couldn't challenge, there were 

1. People come to social media to be social and not read brochure and brochureware and that's not my opinion, it's backed by research. Research from Telstrahere and research from Sproutsocialhere.

2. Content is not the output. What do I mean? Well so many people think that content is somehow what we do. We post content, end of. Wrong, social media is about conversations, after all it's social on media and conversations create sales. What you and I sell needs a conversation. If you are posting on social media and that does not create a conversation, you are wasting your time.

3. The way algorithms and people work. The way Linkedin works is if you post something and there is no engagement, then the algorithm learns you are posting content that does not engagement and therefore it won't promote you. The way people work, is we scroll through our timelines going "boring, boring, boring ...." we avoid and don't look at boring content. 

If you post boring content, brochures, brochureware, white papers etc, you teach the algorithm and your customers to ignore you. Simple as. 

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