The Untapped Audience That Companies Are Missing

 

As originally seen on Forbes

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“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges –

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”

-The Explorer by Rudyard Kipling

Every company has a massive hidden audience – the friends and contacts of their employees. In Rudyard Kipling’s praised poem The Explorer, he talks of something that is lost and waiting behind the Ranges. For every company, organization or firm this is the combined network of our employees if we can just take a second to reach them.

In hundreds of interviews with firms and companies all over the world,  I see a pattern of apathy towards the employee’s network and a consuming focus on corporate messaging from official LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages. It isn’t the employers don’t want their people sharing, they typically don’t know what they are missing and if they do know, they have a hard time activating those networks.

Employees are the biggest untapped marketing resource that your company has. Their influence is right there to be leveraged, but it’s up to you to find them “behind the Ranges.”

Think of it like this: your company has about 250 followers on LinkedIn. That’s great! You’ll get the eyes of a few employees or alumni on whatever content you share. But what if you can get 100 of your employees to share that same content? The average professional has over 500 connections on LinkedIn and Twitter combined, so that’s an audience of 50,000 that could be looking at your content.

Consider the following stat:

Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by the employees’ as opposed to the brands.

And if that’s not enough:

Leads developed through employee social media are 7 times more likely to convert than other leads.

Every single company has a massive hidden audience that can be leveraged at any time. It’s up to you to go out and find them.

“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges –

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”