The employees are a vital part of your organization. So why not involve them in your content marketing journey? Get them more involved in the inbound marketing circle. Let’s discuss three aspects to employee engagement in corporate blogging – how to get your employees to read, contribute and share the corporate blog.

In every step of the way, we can use gamification to improve the employee engagement. Having the employees take part in such activities definitely has positive effects as they get a sense of their progress. The contributions from their side will also drastically increase.

How to get employees to read the blogs?

• Involve them in the work process: Get them into the process of content creation and marketing. Keeping them in the loop makes them feel like they are equally a part of the whole process, so they would want to read the blogs.
• Keep the blogs simple: The blogs have to be readable and simple for anybody in the organization to be able to connect with.
• Add a contest or some kind of poll: Make the process of reading blogs fun. Having fun activities for the people who read the blogs, such as a leaderboard with the top reader/commenter.

Then comes a huge step, how to get the employees to make a contribution to corporate blogging?

If you go up to an employee who hasn’t been in the content creation journey to write a blog, you might not get the commitment. And it might sound like this….

“Why should I write?”

“What will I write about?”

“Who is going to read all this?”

“Sorry, I don’t write very well and do not have the time!”

Those questions are actually valid. You have to show them the benefits of their contribution to the blog.

1. A blog can be a lead generation tool and an employee’s blog post can directly contribute to the company’s revenue.

2. High-quality content on the blog brings in new eyeballs. (include stat on blogs bringing in web traffic)

3. More content and those that answer client questions to the point are appreciated.

4. Employees can write about their work and interests pertaining to the organization.

5. Employees must remember this is a chance to showcase their competence and talent.

 

Motivate your employees to bring out articles regularly. Check out this Infographic by Officevibe!

“Make being part of the blog a reward. Don’t beg people to do it. Make it something that goes to a top individual in a particular category, then help them write it and show their talents. When it’s looked at as a reward, people desire it more.” — Craig Stumpf, Contact at Once!

 

Here’s how blogging has impacted a number business through their website content marketing.

 

And lastly, how do you get them to share all this content that you create?

We have already how much of an impact it would make if every employee contributed to the content for corporate blogging. If each one of them shared it with their friends and this continues, you can imagine the number of people that will be aware of your corporate blog.

‘Those who participate are the biggest advocates‘ if employees are in charge of the content that would further motivate them to share it with everyone, especially on social media.

Even while sharing we need to keep in mind the dos and don’ts .

Image Credit: Bufferapp

1. Share some basic social media sharing tips with the employees.
2. The messages that they share should be simple and crisp
3. Try and maintain a consistent voice for all the posts that are shared
4. Empower the individuality in each of them
5. Discuss the importance of knowing target audience and wiring the posts towards them
6. The act of social share should not be forced upon
7. Discuss the stats and positives of number of shares
8. Let the art of sharing be fun and inculcated in the daily routine

Let’s explore into some of the leading corporate blogs:

Google Blog:

Includes employees from across countries to contribute to their blog. The bloggers include software engineers, technical program manager to the vice president.

O’Reilly Radar:

This is a technology book publishing company. They have bloggers writing about various topics that include business, laws, data visualization and programming, just to name a few. Their motive is to connect with other people and not just with organizations as a whole.

Zillow:

They are a free real estate evaluation website. Their blogs are rich in content that has become valuable resources to the audience. Having kept their target audience in mind, they were able to cover critical real estate questions while keeping the posts light-hearted.

Here’s more on the leading corporate blogs.

 

Let us know in the comments how you think companies can improve employee engagement in corporate blogs!