It’s quite a story as you might imagine
In early June this year I decided that it was about time to start a new project in the office, I called it the “Everyone Must Share” project. The idea behind this was that everyone in the office would join the efforts of sharing our Facebook and Blog posts with all their network. Luckily for me everyone at imonomy is a team player, even our investors and CEO are always liking, sharing and tweeting everything I post. After one week it was clear to me that the eventual problem was not convincing my friends here in the office to participate, the problem was that they just didn’t have the time to share our content.
I don’t know if you have ever worked in a successful startup, the better startups have talented and highly mission invested employees. At imonomy you will find the most hardworking team you can imagine, people have a to-do-list from here to Timbuktu because they want to do more and more. My only personal problem with this situation, is that it blocks me from running an effective content sharing policy. It was clear to us that I needed to find a solution that will not include me bugging people around the clock.
All roads led to the same place
I accidentally found a solution thanks to Yael from Roojoom. Right before I left her office after a lovely meeting, I watched her share a post through what looked to be a social media management dashboard of some sort. I asked her about what she was using, and in a nutshell it sounded like a great tool for marketers, but because I was already in a rush and on my way out her door, I couldn’t get a chance to hear about all the full great features that platform had in store, heck I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even ask for the name of the tool.
Later on that same day I was visiting another friend named Nadav, the CEO of Inbound Junction, he was giving me a tour of his new office space. When I got to his office I found out that he will start working door by door with the company who was behind the social media dashboard I saw earlier that day at Yael’s office! (I only recognized the logo shape on their door, and it also took me a couple of minutes to put the pieces together)
It was clear to me that this was a sign from above that I need to give this tool a tryout, so I decided to enter their door and make first contact with Oktopost’s marketing team to hear firsthand about all the benefits of their social media platform for businesses.
These guys nailed it!
I rarely call an early stage startup amazing in my blog posts, but what the guys at Oktopost built was exactly what I was looking for. They developed a feature that allows me to schedule posts in the name of our employees on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (!). The best part is that I can do everything without having any of them giving up on any private information, and they don’t have give me actual access to the account . In short: this means that everyone is sharing imonomy’s posts without giving up on their personal space, and more importantly I don’t need to wait for anyone to have free time to share our content.
Here is how it looks like step by step:
As you can imagine having 5, 20 or 50 employees is substantially different, you will probably get much more traffic if you have more profiles connected to your Oktopost, but the end result will probably be the same no matter how many people you have connected, more quality exposure.
This is all great for business blogs where you have many employees, what about online news publishers and niche blogs?
Well this might me more tricky, but if I did learn one thing in my short career working on social media tools, is that just like in life, family comes first. My Dad and Mom love sharing the content I post, my sister and friends always press “like” and comment, so why wouldn’t they trust me when it comes to sharing content? If you are known for sharing high quality content there shouldn’t be any problem for people to give you access to post on their behalf. Everything that ever became viral online started with one or two first shares from people who had no idea that what they were sharing is about to reach almost the whole world, secure those first shares, never just press publish and wait for that attention to magically appear out of nowhere.
Actually I am not doing any service to Oktopost because they have many more features. One, in particular, is the ability to measure leads converted from social posting. Not only that, the platform allows you to see who the leads are and which posts they clicked on – this information can also be sent to third party platforms such as Salesforce to help push them down the sales funnel.
In Conclusion
Your main take should be that small tool and a good personal strategy can go a long way, do you know another way to drive social traffic in a similar way? Share with us in the comments bellow 🙂