Your employees and field teams are already filming and posting about their work with your brand. Our question this week introduces the subject of decentralized social media teams by decoding how to find content that already exists before you fund anything new.
Every employee, headquartered or in the field, carries a camera. The moments your customers actually care about happen at your locations, not at headquarters.
Headquarters builds the plans and drives people into the door. But once customers are standing in front of your team, what gets captured? That is where the real, authentic footage lives, and it almost never reaches your social channels without an organized effort spearheading that approach.
Before building any kind of field content program, the first move is to find out who is already creating. The content supply exists today, yet the true task is taking inventory of what is useful.
This matters because a one or two person social team at corporate cannot capture everything meaningful happening across your locations. And, I have seen job listings for social media operations leads built specifically around tracking user-generated content and establishing field content programs covering 500+ potential creators, because brands want their own channels to carry more robust, authentic content than headquarters alone can produce. The conversation became focused on scaling quality content sourced from the field which is vastly different from where we were previously.
Employee-generated content used to be taboo. Over the past five or six years, especially post-pandemic, brands have gotten more comfortable with employees posting about their work. This mindset shift means the content is out there and brands see more value than risk with decentralized social media content production. And, as always, the brands moving fastest are the ones taking inventory of it.
Finding this content is not complicated, but it does take a deliberate look in a few specific places: employees’ own accounts if you tag them internally as staff, location and franchise pages, tagged customer posts that lead back to a specific employee, provider or stylist accounts if your business runs on that model, and internal chats or newsletters where great moments get shared but aren’t used to its fullest potential.
Transparently, brand risk does exist when discussing a decentralized social media content production team: unmanaged posting does carry some risk, and that is a fair concern. But, this stage, inventory, is where governance begins. Nobody can set guardrails for content they cannot see. Here is where Known Social employs our three questions because once you have the list, a rule can track tags and location mentions automatically, AI can help sort what is found by topic and quality, and a person reviews candidates and reaches out.
Lastly, before establishing contact with your future field creators, ensure that the employee handbook at your company is updated to actually support people creating content on behalf of the brand in the first place. As discussed, the previous unease with employee generated content being taboo, can linger in legacy documents.
Who inside our company is already making content about us that we never see?
Ask your Head of Social this directly, then follow with: how would we find out this week? This opens a conversation about the value of this approach for the social media team’s bandwidth, and whether a decentralized approach could free them to focus on strategy instead of manually chasing content so often.
This week’s video walks through how I built this inventory process at scale, including the program I ran at TGI Fridays. Watch it here.
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