Your top employees represent the collective face of your company. It’s incumbent upon you to leverage their strengths in the service of your corporate brand — presenting a unified, capable, and diverse image to prospective clients, employees, and vendors.
Improving your key employees’ online presence is an effective and relatively low-cost way to exercise this leverage.
Let’s take a look at six strategies that may raise your team’s profile and draw favorable attention.
1. Expand Your Website’s Personnel Pages
Your company website no doubt has one or more “team” or personnel pages. Depending on its architecture, it may have individualized pages for each key team member.
If the latter, work on expanding and standardizing these pages with detailed descriptions of the employee’s credentials and capabilities, educational attainment, work history, and purview.
If the former, build dedicated sub-pages for each key employee and flesh out with relevant details.
2. Add All Relevant Work Experience to LinkedIn
Your employees’ LinkedIn profiles are highly visible and extremely credible. Ensure that they’re working in the service of your corporate brand by requesting that each key employee updates his or her LinkedIn profile to reflect all relevant work experience (or, with the employee’s permission, tasking your social media manager with the same).
These digital CVs can go back as far as necessary to confer credibility — for instance, Miami entrepreneur George Otte outlines work experience from his college days.
3. Create a Professional Twitter Handle
Many of your employees likely have personal Twitter handles, but these are unsuitable for professional positioning.
Ask each key employee to create a separate, wholly professional Twitter handle and set a reasonable schedule for tweets and updates.
Lisa Curtis of Kuli Kuli Foods has an active Twitter presence that remains on-brand, no matter what.
4. Turn Up a Professional Blog
Ask your employees to create or reboot their own professional blogs. These portals should cover topics specific to that person’s role or skills — for instance, your HR manager’s blog shouldn’t opine on supply chain issues.
Cross-post relevant entries on your own corporate blog, or house employee blogs on your corporate website if server space allows.
5. Create Contributor Accounts at High-visibility Publications
Encourage your employees to create and utilize contributor accounts at high-visibility publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Business.com.
These sites confer immense credibility; Forbes contributor Josh Steimle expounds on the benefits of his chosen site’s contributorship model in the linked piece.
6. Create Multimedia Content That Plays to Their Strengths
Your key employees aren’t monolithic. Encourage them to create engaging multimedia content that plays to their respective strengths.
For instance, a YouTube video series about various technical concepts, or a set of tongue-in-cheek marketing videos that double as lead-generation tools.
Toward a Better Corporate Presence
Your employees are your company’s most important asset. Without them, you’d be unable to meet your obligations or clear the high expectations set by your clients.
Giving them the tools they need to improve their online presence — and, by extension, your organization’s — will no doubt aid your efforts to retain them in a competitive labor market.
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