Mining for hidden gems. Working with internal teams to identify content for social media

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones. Maybe your social media team is inundated with never- ending engaging content from across your business, and you are regularly having to disappoint internal teams because you simply don’t have the bandwidth to use everything they want to share. You have too much content, not enough channel! You’re able to curate an engaging and varied social media feed and I’m sure your legion of followers love you for it. Great work!

For some of us who manage social media channels for our pharma clients however, uncovering those hidden gems across a large organization to present to the world via social media can be challenging. People don’t know what to share, why they should share it, or how to talk about it. People aren’t sure about what is of interest to others, what is compliant, what other companies are doing, or even the broader corporate communications strategy that social media supports.

Taking teams on a journey from producing little to no content to beating your door down with an abundance of rich media is possible, but how do you make it happen? Here are my top tips:

1. Start slow! Involve teams with the planning of your editorial calendar. OK, you’re already doing that but as well as asking them what they have coming up or what they are working on, are you also sharing what other parts of the business or even other competitors are doing? Taking a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach can help people to see what the request is and get them motivated to contribute
2. Show how it fits together. Do you have a clear vision for how your social media channels support your overarching corporate communications strategy? Of course you do! So share this with the teams you work with. Help them understand how they are supporting the broader organization by sharing their content, as well as the work they do
3. Collaborate on content at first. Offer to interview key people to help uncover points of interest and develop content together. Try to help teams to take more ownership of development over time, but remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint
4. Recognize success and give feedback. Use your analytics to inform your teams of what works and what doesn’t
5. Identify their audience for them. Think about what different teams’ key audiences are (ask them!) and how you can curate a following among that audience. How can you target and promote to that group? What are their interests? What will engage them? This takes time but when one of your colleagues is congratulated on their social media content by an important external stakeholder, you will have created a true believer

So there you go, five key tips to try out. Any other ideas? I am sure we would all be very grateful to hear them!

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