In today’s day and age people are sick of hearing about your company. If you are going to implement an employee advocacy program then you better have a clear strategy on what kind of content you are going to ask your employees to share. This means stepping outside of your comfort zone and understanding that you will need good 3rd party content to go along with your 1st party content.

As a marketer, your goal is to attract and nurture prospects/leads and build awareness about your brand. The problem is that if you only provide your own company’s content for your employees to share – the people that follow them on social media will tire of them quickly, unfollow them, and see them as simply a vessel for marketing material.

So, your role as the program lead is to come up with a content recipe that will allow your employees to build value, establish thought leadership, maintain interest and of course to generate leads. That’s why the 4:1:1 formula exists. If you follow the 4:1:1 formula then you will ensure that over time you will achieve all of the above consistently and over the long term.

So what is this magic recipe? Well it goes like this…

For every 6 pieces of content you distribute to be shared, 4 of those pieces of content should be 3rd party sourced. Content like research reports, how-to’s, tips and tricks or other content which has the explicit purpose of providing value and building thought leadership and must not be directly sourced from your company. This is your GIVE. Of the remaining 2 pieces of content, 1 should be a link to something related to your company which is un-gated and is useful such as a blog post, YouTube video, etc. This is your SHARE. The final piece of content should then be a link to gated company content such as a whitepaper, webinar signup page, etc. This is your ASK.

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