Do you want your employees to contribute to your social media marketing?

Looking for tools to manage the content people share on social?

In this article, you’ll discover five tools that will help you coordinate the content your team posts on social media.

5 Social Sharing Tools for Teams by Cynthia Johnson on Social Media Examiner.

#1: Leverage Employee Advocacy With Smarp

If you’re looking for ways to increase social shares of your content, investing in an employee advocacy tool like Smarp may be a good option for you. Smarp makes it easy to encourage employees to share your content, as well as curated third-party content that’s relevant to your niche.

If your employees are already using social media to increase lead capture or boost their personal brands, they’re surely always on the lookout for good on-topic content to share. Smarp can help them share the right content, benefiting your business in turn.

Smarp offers a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans, which start at $3.98/month. As an admin, you can use the browser extension to push content to your team’s Smarp feed, where employees can see your suggestions. You can also integrate your company’s social media accounts and RSS feeds so content gets posted automatically.

Smarp lets admins push content to your team’s news feed, where they can view and share it.

Employees can share content from your team’s feed to the social networks they’ve connected to their Smarp profiles. The app makes it easy to share content via copied URLs too.

Employees can see the content you’ve added to Smarp and click a social share button to share it with their followers.

Smarp also lets employees suggest and comment on content, which helps build a sense of camaraderie. To encourage sharing, you can award points when employees share a post or invite more users. They can then exchange these points for rewards or a charitable donation.

Your employees can earn points for sharing content from Smarp.

Employees are ranked on a gamified leaderboard based on performance, which helps foster competition and boost sharing.

Smarp has built-in analytics that let admins track post, employee, and team performance. In addition to standard social media metrics like post engagement and reach, Smarp tracks earned media value (EMV), which is what you would have paid to drive similar impact using native promoted posts. It’s a handy way to track the ROI of your employee advocacy efforts.

You can view a variety of impact metrics with Smarp’s built-in analytics.

Admin analytics also make it easy to identify in-house influencers and make adjustments to your bounty point modeling to incentivize the types of activity that serve your business best.

Make sure you integrate your RSS feed with your dashboard so content will automatically appear. You’ll need to manually post links to lead magnets and similar content. Smarp lets you reorder items so your most important content appears at the top.

For manually posted content, you can schedule set times for the content to appear and be archived (disappear).

Along with links to content, be sure to post photos of employees at work and photos from events. Employees are more likely to share photos, especially if they appear in them. These photos can unify your company and strengthen work culture, and help with social recruiting.

Choose a set time for manually added content to be available in Smarp.

Takeaway: The main benefit of using an employee advocacy tool like Smarp is that it can increase shares, traffic, and hopefully sales. Along with this, you can get a slew of other benefits like a stronger work culture and credibility.

#2: Streamline Content Distribution With Anders Pink

Anders Pink is a content curation platform designed by the people behind BuzzSumo. It helps you and your team find and share the most popular niche-relevant content on the web so you can build authority, gain followers, and increase engagement.

With the free account, you’ll get access to basic features. If you want to use Anders Pink with your team, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the team plans, which start at $39/month.

You can sign up with either your Twitter account or your email account. Be sure to link your Anders Pink and Twitter accounts to see the top-engaged content shared by people in your network.

After you log in, choose some topics of interest.

After you sign up with Anders Pink, choose some topics of interest.

The app will then show you the best content related to those topics from around the web. Click See More to discover more and filter articles on a specific topic.

Click See More to see additional articles for a specific topic.

In the left menu, click Discover to see even more content or click Latest News to see the freshest posts from top news sites.

Click Discover to explore additional content in Anders Pink.

One of Anders Pink’s best features is briefings, which help you quickly find high-quality, topic-specific content. To set up a briefing, click Briefings > Create Briefings in the left menu. Then pick some topics or source options.

To set up a briefing, choose topics you’re interested in.

After adding your topics, you can filter your search by adding or excluding certain words and limiting sites. If you’d like, one of these sites can be your own.

You can exclude certain words or sites from your briefing.

Once you’ve created your briefing, click Save and give it a name and description. You can even choose to make it publicly available. Some people have created publicly available briefings that you can follow in the Discover section.

You can make your briefing publicly available to other Anders Pink users.

Briefings are updated every few hours so you’ll see the latest content available. You can adjust the settings to see content published up to three months back.

If you have a team plan, you can share your briefings with your team. To set up a team, click your profile name in the top-right corner and select Create Team.

Click your profile name and select Create Team.

Give your team a name, invite users to join your team, and adjust the team settings. Save your settings when you’re finished.

Fill in the details to set up your team in Anders Pink.

Now when you set up new briefings, everyone on your team will be able to view the content.

Team members can recommend content by clicking the thumbs up icon, save articles they like, and even leave comments. When you leave comments, you can tag other team members. These discussions may help you decide what content to post, when to post it, and what descriptions/hashtags to add.

Click the Share button to share an article on social media.

To share an article, click Share and choose your social network or schedule your share with Buffer.

Choose the network to which you want to share the article.

Takeaway: Anders Pink can help your team stay organized and develop a system to consistently distribute content published by you or anyone else.

#3: Manage Content Curation With Inoreader

While Anders Pink is great for discovering trending content on social media, it’s not the best solution for automating content curation from sites you already know and trust. For this, you need a sophisticated newsreader like Inoreader.

With a free account, Inoreader lets you subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs you follow or search for specific topics to find blogs to follow. For instance, a search for “science” reveals the following results in the feeds filter. To subscribe to a feed, click the + sign.

Click the + button to subscribe to a blog with Inoreader.

When you follow a feed, you have the option to add the feed to a folder to make it easy to find later on. You can create as many folders as you like.

For example, you might create folders based on specific topics or people with whom you want to build relationships. This makes it easy to curate the right content at the right times.

When you follow a feed, you can save it to a folder.

The feeds are updated every 10 minutes. If you upgrade to a paid plan, you can set rules to update your team via email, push out desktop alerts, or even automate shares when fresh content appears. Paid plans start at $14.99/year; free trials are available.

To set up a rule, right-click on a folder or subscription and select Create Rule.

Right-click a folder and choose Create Rule.

In the pop-up window, give the rule a name and choose a trigger. I like to use the trigger New Article in Folder so I’m updated as soon as the article appears. You can also set filters to receive updates only for certain posts.

Finally, choose if you prefer to be updated by email, desktop alert, or push to a third-party service. Then save your rule. Now you and your team will be among the first to share fresh content from that particular site, author, or social presence.

Set up your rule in Inoreader.

To share content, just open the article and click one of the share icons below the post.

Click a social sharing icon at the bottom of the article you want to share.

To reveal additional sharing options, click the down-arrow to the right of the Google+ icon. Among the share options are Hootsuite and Buffer, which make it easy to schedule content.

Inoreader lets you view which of your teammates have shared your content and lets teammates leave comments.

Click the arrow button to see additional sharing icons.

Takeaway: Inoreader is a great tool for automatically suggesting shareworthy content from sites you want to build relationships with, as well as content sources your ideal audience likely trusts. It can help you discover new sites too, but Anders Pink is better for that. Set up workflows that combine these two tools, and you and your team of co-advocates will have plenty of content to share.

#4: Coordinate Social Content Delivery With Buffer for Business

You might have noticed that Anders Pink and Inoreader make it easy to share content with Buffer, which is free to use and has one of the best interfaces for social scheduling. You probably already have an account.

To get the most out of Buffer as a team, though, you need a Buffer for Business account. It lets you set up access for a higher volume of logins (from 5 to 25, depending on the tier you select) and even more social profiles (5 per “seat”). Your account will also get access to detailed analytics that show how well your posts perform over time.

Buffer offers a 14-day free trial of its business account, after which you’ll pay $10/month.

To add team members to your account, click on Admin in the top-right corner and select Team Members.

Choose Admin > Team Members to set up a team in your Buffer for Business account.

Click Invite a New Team Member and then add the names and email addresses of the people you want to join your team. Choose which of your business’s social networks they can access.

Fill out the invite details for the person you want to add to your Buffer team.

You can also assign a membership level. Your two options are Approval Required, which lets team members only suggest content, and Full Posting Access, which lets them schedule posts on behalf of others. Suggested content will be scheduled only after you approve each post.

Choose an access level for the person you’re adding to your team.

If team members want to suggest or schedule content, they can use the Buffer browser extension to add any URL to the queue.

Team users can also add content directly from the Content Inbox. This Buffer feature lets you connect blog feeds. When posts go live, Buffer gives you the option to schedule them quickly, as you can see below.

Schedule an article share via the Content Inbox.

Because it’s easy to manually adjust posting schedules, you can be confident that your team’s posts will go out at optimal times.

To be certain that your team is coordinating and posting like a well-oiled machine, you can analyze their performance with Buffer for Business’s detailed analytics.

You get detailed analytics for your Buffer for Business account.

Takeaway: While Anders Pink and Inoreader are great for finding content to share, they don’t offer all of the advanced scheduling features that Buffer provides. Therefore, it’s a good idea to combine their strengths with Buffer’s to increase engagement.

#5: Simplify Social Sharing With Triberr

One of the best ways for blogs to grow is by taking part in “tribes,” where different members of a like-minded community support each other by discussing and sharing one another’s content.

Triberr simplifies the social sharing aspect of this type of activity. On Triberr, people can create tribes and invite others to join them. The tribe members can connect their RSS feeds for automated pushes that yield a high volume of shares, assuming the tribe is highly engaged and vigilant about helping each other out.

Triberr’s free plan lets you create three tribes and connect two blogs. For additional features, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan, starting at $8.50/month.

When you publish a new blog post, it appears in your tribe and members of the tribe can share the content directly from their Triberr dashboards.

Triberr makes it easy for people in your tribe to share your blog posts.

Once they do so, you’ll see an “Affinity” label next to the post and the post will bump to the top of your feed. When people are informed of co-shares, it encourages reciprocity. After all, the idea is to build a mutually beneficial relationship among all members of your tribe.

Tribe owners can also see who is active and inactive, which makes it easy to boot people who aren’t pulling their weight.

An affinity label appears next to a post that’s shared.

In addition to getting shares of your content, Triberr is a useful tool for finding great content to share and building relationships with relevant micro-influencers.

To find tribes to join, you’ll need to get an invitation from the tribe owner. Just head to the Tribes section on the menu bar.

To search for Tribes, filter by category, number of users, and reach. When you’re first starting out here, look for tribes with fewer users so it’s easier to remember who’s who and build relationships attentively.

Go to the Tribes tab to search for tribes to join on Triberr.

Browse through the results and click through to the tribes most likely to match. Follow the tribes you’re interested in and contact the owners on the Members tab, where they’ll be listed as chief.

Contact the tribe chief to ask them to invite you to the tribe.

If you check out these user profiles, you’ll find a link to their website and social media accounts. This makes it easy to reach out to relevant chiefs so you can ask them to invite you to their tribes.

Takeaway: Join and build as many small tribes as you can and begin sharing a lot of content from here so you can build your Triberr authority. Once you build a presence on smaller Tribes, you can shoot for bigger ones. Sometimes just regular sharing will lead to receiving invitations to more tribes.

Conclusion

With algorithm-powered news feeds making it increasingly hard for businesses to get posts seen by their followers, promoting content on social media has started to feel like a pay-to-play shakedown. Peer-to-peer sharing, however, continues to thrive, with micro-influencers and niche thought leaders now relishing their roles as hubs of useful information.

This is where strong relationships with a lot of people come in handy. Having a strategy that gets people to share will naturally help you reach more people because the sum of their audiences will likely be greater than your own.

It isn’t just about the number of people reached, though. Your content also reaches different people who may not have seen your content before. These newer visitors will be more likely to convert to social media followers, subscribers, and customers.

Of course, developing a reputation for thought leadership and driving qualified traffic requires finding the right mix of content by you, content about you, and content that’s simply relevant to you and interesting to your audience. That’s why curating content is likewise a key element to a successful team posting strategy.

But going about this manually can take a colossal amount of time, and the larger your army of social media advocates gets, the harder it’ll be to coordinate with everyone without making any mistakes. The five tools above can help you and your allies synchronize for maximum impact.

What do you think? Do you use any of the above tools to post content as a team at your company? Would you like to add any to the list? Please leave your comments below.

Want your LinkedIn posts to attract more viewers?

Wondering how to increase views and shares of your LinkedIn content?

In this article, you’ll discover five simple tactics to improve engagement on your LinkedIn posts.

How to Improve Your LinkedIn Engagement by John Espirian on Social Media Examiner.

#1: Write Text-Only Posts

You’ve probably heard that people engage more when a social media post shows an image or video. Although that might be true on platforms like Twitter, this tactic doesn’t seem to work on LinkedIn.

In fact, my preferred LinkedIn posting strategy used to be linking to useful content that I’d found or written. Sometimes, these updates included an image and a link, or an image without a link. Pretty typical stuff, right?

The problem was that this strategy didn’t work. Over time, viewing figures for my updates were going down. However, engagement figures for my text-only posts (those without links, images, or tags) weren’t going down. These text-only posts were performing much better than every other kind of update.

Think about your own experience with LinkedIn. Every so often, you’ll see a short text-only post in your stream that has a stack of likes and comments. How often do you see an update get that sort of engagement when it contains a link to a blog or some other third-party site? That’s rare.

The engagement potential for text-only LinkedIn posts is huge.

For the past two months, my text-only posts have received on average three times more views than posts that contain links to external sites. Posts with images perform better than posts with links, but neither performs anywhere near as well as short text-only posts.

My text-only posts are out-performing my link, image, and video posts.

LinkedIn lets you include up to 1,300 characters in a post, which is roughly 250 words. Although that’s barely the equivalent of a very short blog post, you still have enough space to include some detail. For example, this post about applying for a job is about 240 words.

You can write about 250 words in a text-only post, which is enough space to include some detail about your topic.

If you need more space than that, you could always publish an article on Publisher, LinkedIn’s built-in blogging platform.

Why Do Text-Only Posts Work?

It makes sense that LinkedIn doesn’t want to display too many posts containing links to third-party sites. Each time someone clicks one of those links, they leave the LinkedIn platform. That means they spend less time on LinkedIn.

This gives LinkedIn a smaller window of opportunity to show ads or upsell services such as LinkedIn Premium. Therefore, LinkedIn doesn’t prefer anything that potentially will push users away from the platform. LinkedIn isn’t alone though; the same thing happens on every other social network too.

How to Write Effective Text-Only Posts

Here are a few tips for writing text-only posts on LinkedIn:

Keep it short. No one wants to read walls of text. Also, on LinkedIn mobile, a See More link appears on text updates longer than five lines. On the desktop version, your post is cut off after only three lines. With these limits in mind, if you use a storytelling approach, put a compelling hook in the first line to encourage people to read the whole post.

A See More link appears after five lines on LinkedIn mobile.

Ask a question. Anything that elicits a response will increase engagement. Make your question easy to answer and relevant to your field.

Take a stand. If you have an opinion on a relevant topic, share it and invite comments. If you can back up your stance with solid reasoning and evidence, people may begin to see you as a thought leader in your field.

Include links in the comments. Make your initial post text only, but then post a reply that includes the link that you wanted to share (if there is one). The same goes for images: post them as replies.

Beware of inflammatory or sensationalist opinions and rhetoric. Such posts are rarely justified on social media or anywhere else. Also, be careful about posting moans and mini-rants, which often draw a lot of comments and can result in thousands of views but work only when they’re authentic. You don’t want your stance to do long-term damage to your credibility.

#2: Like Your Own Posts

Why does a Like button appear next to your own social media posts? Is it really okay to give yourself a thumbs-up, heart, or whatever is the latest symbol of approval? It almost feels like a trick: “Here’s a button that you really shouldn’t click.” However, ignoring this button is a mistake, because liking your own posts and status updates will increase engagement with the post.

Click the Like button on your own LinkedIn posts.

The same goes for liking your own comments. This tactic is especially powerful if others have commented on your post because they’ll continue to see notifications about new likes and comments on the post, and that might encourage them to contribute again in some way.

Liking your own posts helps because people are more likely to interact with content if others have interacted first. Put another way, if the dance floor is empty, it takes guts to be the first person to hop up and start busting a move. But if others are there already, it’s much easier to join the party.

#3: Engage With Comments

Pay attention to anyone who takes time out of their day to leave a comment on one of your posts or status updates. Like user comments and post replies to continue the discussion.

People who have commented will see a notification and that could drive further engagement, ideally leading them to share your post with their network.

#4: Record and Share Native Video

With LinkedIn native video in the mobile app, you can record a video inside the app or upload a pre-made video from your camera roll. To find the video feature in the most current version of the app, look for the video camera icon in the top-right corner.

Look for the video camera icon in the LinkedIn mobile app.

Just as with Facebook, native video on LinkedIn autoplays on mute. Because the LinkedIn video feature currently doesn’t add captions for you, share videos that have captions “burned in” (that is, the captions are part of the video file) to help catch people’s attention and increase engagement.

There are various ways to add captions to video. If you’re on iOS, you can use a tool like Apple Clips. Similarly, you need to use a separate video editing application to edit your video or stitch multiple videos into one.

When you post an engaging video, your followers will watch it. And LinkedIn will favor native video because it doesn’t tempt people to click a link that sends them to YouTube, Vimeo, or any other video platform.

In the short-term, native video on LinkedIn is still a novelty and presents an opportunity for you to stand out. It makes sense for LinkedIn to promote this sort of content above other types of update. Give LinkedIn native video a try and see what happens to your engagement.

LinkedIn native video autoplays in the feed.

#5: Make Your Updates Public

Since July 2017, LinkedIn lets you make status updates visible to the public. To do so, you need to check your settings and then you can choose to make any post public.

Check Your Settings

You can’t change the relevant settings via the LinkedIn mobile app, but you can via a desktop browser. To begin, click the Me icon at the top of the LinkedIn homepage, click Settings & Privacy, and then click the Privacy tab at the top of the page.

Under the Blocking and Hiding section is the Followers option. Click Change, and then from the drop-down list, select Everyone on LinkedIn.

To enable your posts to be seen publicly, set the Followers drop-down to Everyone on LinkedIn.

Next, click Profile Privacy in the sidebar on the left. Where the Edit Your Public Profile option appears, click the Change link. You’ll see a page with your LinkedIn profile and a column of settings on the right.

Make sure the Make My Public Profile Visible to Everyone radio button is selected. Under the radio button, make sure that the Posts & Activities box is checked.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile settings allow anyone to see your public posts.

Make and Share a Public Post

After you check that your privacy settings allow public posts, you can make any post visible online. First, when you create your post, use the drop-down list at the bottom to set your post to Public.

To make a LinkedIn post visible to anyone, select Public from the drop-down list.

After you post your content on LinkedIn, you can share the public post via your other social media profiles. Use the ellipsis (three dots) menu to copy the link to your LinkedIn post. Then simply paste that link into a Facebook post, tweet, Instagram post, and so forth.

Adjust your privacy settings to share your LinkedIn posts publicly.

The ability to share posts publicly is great for promotion on other social networks, helping you increase engagement and improve profile discovery. For instance, if someone in a Facebook group has asked a question that’s discussed in one of your LinkedIn updates, share the public link in the group and you’ll drive more people to view your content.

Track Engagement Rates for Your Posts

As you make changes to your LinkedIn posts to improve engagement, you can check a few stats to see what tactics are working. To find stats for views, click your profile avatar in the top-left corner. Then on mobile, tap the See More option in the Activity section, or on desktop, click See All Activity in the Your Articles & Activity section.

The Posts tab lists all of your recent status updates, with the newest updates at the top of the screen. Beneath each update is a view count. There’s also a count shown for updates that contain native videos. (Watching a video for more than 3 seconds counts as a view.)

You can keep scrolling down to see all of your past activity, but the view counts are displayed for only the past month of status updates. You can see older posts in your history, but viewing figures aren’t displayed for them.

A view counter appears beneath each of your posts for the past month.

On the desktop version of LinkedIn, you can also find data about shares. View your post stats and click the Reshare tab to see a list of shares for a post. You can then dive in to comment on and like those posts.

Make sure you interact positively with the people who’ve shared your content. These people are usually your most engaged readers and are most likely to amplify your message. Recognizing and celebrating them are great ways to build more engagement over time.

When viewing stats for a post, look for the Reshare section.

Conclusion

Remember that LinkedIn wants to keep users on the platform, and posting third-party links encourages users to go somewhere else. Text-only updates, on the other hand, keep users on the platform so LinkedIn will be much more likely to show that sort of content in the feed.

Keep your updates short and relevant, invite comments, and make sure you react positively to everyone who takes the time to engage with your content.

What do you think? Do you think any of these tactics will work for you? What ideas do you plan to try? Please share your thoughts in the comments.