Behind the Post

Having an employee advocacy program increases the total social engagement for a brand by 25% to 40% at minimum. (2022 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report)

Employee advocacy programs bring a wealth of benefits–expanded reach, enhanced trust, and credibility, thought leadership, the list goes on!

When it comes to employee participation, those who lead advocacy initiatives understand that engagement ebbs and flows. So what can be done if advocate shares slow down?

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina sits down for a solo episode to discuss strategies you can implement if advocacy shares start to dip.

She talks through how to get advocate feedback, how to encourage positive sharing behaviors, why it’s so important to have a constant line of communication, how to gamify, and key insights on the best times to launch campaigns and initiatives.

Being a marketing professional in a regulated industry is already a challenging task. Add a long buyer cycle into the mix, and the need for a strong strategy becomes even more crucial!

So how can social media marketers effectively maintain brand awareness and establish themselves as thought leaders in their field?

Enter Clare Cavenagh, Communications and Social Media Executive at Singletrack. Clare joins the show to share how she leverages social media and employee advocacy to raise brand awareness, build trust, and position Singletrack as an industry thought leader.

As a writing enthusiast herself, Clare shares her social content strategy that focuses on three main categories: internally generated thought leadership content, curated content from industry news, and more personal content that provides a glimpse into their company culture.

Claire then dives into her winning advocacy strategy. It’s an engaging yet strategic method that aligns with the company's goals and empowers advocates to share content. Her approach involves a monthly meeting and two new goals. The first goal is geared towards employee engagement, and the second is geared towards earning meaningful engagements from their target audience.

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People want to follow people on social media. As soon as we pivoted to showcasing the upside team and our commitments and values, we saw a massive spike in our engagement.”

Today more than ever, audiences demand authenticity from brands on social media. With expertise in the finance and technology industries, no one understands this more than our next guest!

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia welcomes Chloe Stevens, the Senior Content and Social Media Manager at UpSlide. She delves into her approach to social, how she crafts engaging content, and her tips for creating a compelling social media strategy. Chloe even reveals her favorite tech tools to streamline the process.

When it comes to strategy, Chloe emphasizes the importance of reflecting on past performance, setting clear objectives and KPIs, and aligning them with overall business goals. She gives her insights into measuring success beyond vanity metrics to track brand awareness and conversions.

She highlights the significance of understanding your target audience and tailoring content accordingly. Her best tip–join sales calls and directly speak to your customers! To wrap the show, Chloe shares how she’s approaching launching an employee advocacy program and the tactics she's using to get the wider organization’s buy-in!

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“There's so much to be said about looking at content that performs very well, trying to reverse engineer why it works and trying to put your own unique spin on it. It won't always work, but you will end up with templates that you can use over and over again.”

The next Behind the Post guest went from working in a call center to being an author and top content marketer with his work being featured in CNBC, The Times, and Fast Company, as well as leading marketing blogs, including Ahrefs, Search Engine Journal, and SEMrush. 

Sam Thomas Davies, Growth Marketing Manager at Drip, joins host Olivia Messina to discuss his approach to content marketing and his tried and true methods that allow him to always have a repertoire of strong content. 

He believes it’s not just about what you write, it’s how you frame it. Thinking like a writer, it’s enough! You have to think like a publishing house and take into consideration SEO, your reader, etc. It’s so much more than content, it’s how you communicate. 

Since posting on LinkedIn and Twitter daily, Sam delves into his recent learnings, especially about content ideation and his process of including links in posts, and his secret for keeping reach high!

If you’re someone who struggles with writer's block, Sam shares step-by-step how he reverse engineers top-performing content and templates it. He even shares how he utilizes the hub and spoke model to take 1 piece of content like a blog, podcast, or newsletter and transform it into 7-9 pieces. 

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It’s not easy managing a global social media presence of over 7 million followers, but our next guest, Sam Samayoa, makes it looks easy.

Sam is the Senior Social Media at Wipro, and she’s going Behind the Post to reveal how she generates and maintains high engagement on LinkedIn, how she manages writing content on a global scale, and what key indicators she tracks for success.

Especially today, social is often the first touch point with a brand, so Sam speaks on the importance of the 95, 5 rule and a few of the tactics she uses to stay top of mind.

Olivia and Sam even discuss the pressures of working in social media, such as the responsibility of being the voice of the company and the public nature of their work.

Sam even shares where she thinks B2B brands are missing the mark today and why as a social media professional, you have to be comfortable saying no. As a seasoned social media manager, tune in to hear her tricks for writing engaging content, like leading with the problem and always having an eye-catching graphic.

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In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina sits down with Kari Anderson, Social Media Manager at Körber Supply Chain. With a wealth of knowledge and expertise in B2B social media, Kari is passionate about the power of brand storytelling and the importance of relatability in connecting with audiences.

Kari shares her experience rolling out a highly effective social selling program and how she strategically targets the right people with her content. She provides valuable insights on refining your social strategy to meet your audience's expectations and offers valuable advice on how to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Kari delves into how much content is too much content and how she’s turning the Körber social pages into more of a destination, and what content she's creating to do this. She even reveals how she creates a halo effect around their social presence to consistently earn high engagement and deepen the brand community and their advocates' networks as well!
Finally, Kari reveals her successful tactics for training teams to build their personal brands and participate in their employee advocacy program. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to enhance their B2B social media strategy and take their brand to the next level.

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In this episode of Behind the Post, Olivia Messina sits down with Kristina Thomas, Head of Social Media at S&P Global. Kristina leads an award-winning global team and reveals the delicacies and challenges of managing a social strategy in the finance industry.

She shares her secret to creating engaging content, which looks like sharing content that your audience is interested in while sparking conversations. For S&P Global, this is charts and graphs while focusing on the people. Kristina chats about how she educates the wider team on social selling and the importance of executives building their personal brands.

Kristina talks about how she stays timely to ensure she’s posting the right content at the right time and how she utilizes social listening to monitor conversations that could be at risk!

They even dive into the many challenges that a merger can have on a social strategy, like combing social media pages, products sunsetting, and paying attention to the market while still hitting their goal of brand awareness.

Stay until the end to learn why she measures year-over-year and month-over-month improvements and website traffic and why when reporting social media data to stakeholders, less is more!

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The strongest strategies are those that are data-driven. But what does that look like in the B2B social media industry, and what role does social play in the B2B buyer journey?

Here to break it down is Stephanie Melgoza, the Social Media Manager at Vena Solutions. An expert in B2B social, Stephanie’s experience in social spans a variety of industries, including technology, research, and financial services, working on global brand and corporate social teams at IBM and Gartner.

In this episode, she shares her philosophy around social strategy and what it really means to be data-driven. Host Olivia Messina and Stephanie discuss the content types that consistently earn high engagement and why posting more doesn’t guarantee better conversion rates.

When it comes to campaigns and launches, Stephanie believes it’s so important to look at the moving pieces from a higher level and understand how social is contributing to the overall KPIs. When looking at social metrics, she emphasizes the importance of looking at quarterly as well as year-over-year.

They wrap the show discussing one of the most pertinent topics–maintaining mental health in an industry that requires you to always be on. Stephanie reveals how she sets boundaries and the few tactics she uses to maintain her mental health.

Social media teams aren’t on social for the sake of being on social, they are helping to drive business growth! If you want to create a social presence that people want to be a part of and see results for your efforts, you’ll need a strong social strategy.

Nadine Synett, Director of Social Strategy at ZoecialMedia, knows this all too well, and she’s joining host Olivia Messina to dive deep into the basics. She outlines every aspect to include in your strategy, including her 4 pillars of content: education, validation, company, and product/solution.

Nadine shares countless engaging content ideas that you can implement right away! Working with countless clients on the daily, she shares the content types that continually earn high engagement.

They finish out the show by discussing how to measure your social media activities. While success looks different for everyone, there are a handful of metrics that should be tracked across the board, including profile visits, impressions, engagements, and clicks. Her biggest tip? zoom out and focus on long-term growth!

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How do you use social to support business growth? How can you get buy-in from internal stakeholders so social doesn't sit in a silo? Meet Alex Taylor Noble– The Head of Social Media at The Bank of London and the next Behind the Post guest.

Alex believes that brands win when they make it about their community, not themselves. So when it comes to social, the content that’s the most engaging is the content your audience wants to see!

In this episode, Olivia and Alex discuss aligning your social strategy with business goals, the importance of getting buy-in from stakeholders from the inception of campaigns, and the secret to creating engaging content in regulated industries, such as banking. Hint–it’s all about making your social channels a destination and giving more than you ask.