With the rise of digital and social media, brands have unknowingly gained a new marketing channel: their employees.

New advertising technologies and software allow brands to utilize their employees as a covert social media asset, integrating them into their overall strategy.

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, is home to brands looking to promote their businesses and professionals aiming to showcase their careers within a social network. Together with the software company Percolate, LinkedIn has developed new tools to help brands involve their employees in their social media strategies.

LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score

LinkedIn introduced a metric called the Content Marketing Score in its page analytics. The primary factor driving a high score is the company’s employees—the more content they share, the higher the score.

This new measurement mechanism allows LinkedIn to evaluate how effective employees are at amplifying a brand’s reach. It helps brands and companies publish content with the highest chance of visibility and compare their performance to that of competitors.

How the Content Marketing Score Works

Employee-shared content is just one part of the Content Marketing Score. The metric also considers how frequently a brand publishes content and the number of people it reaches. With over 200 million users, LinkedIn developed this feature to encourage more brands, companies, and executives to become active on the platform.

Shifting Perceptions of Employee Monitoring

Monitoring employees’ social media activity is a sensitive topic. In the past, companies observing employees’ profiles on Facebook or Twitter were seen as crossing boundaries. Now, by moving this practice to a professional social network like LinkedIn—and ensuring it is done in a way that employees find agreeable—it is becoming a cornerstone of content marketing.

Percolate’s Role

Percolate helps brands manage their social media accounts and activities while increasingly focusing on involving employees in the process.

Noah Brier, CEO of Percolate, explains why this approach presents a significant opportunity:
“The audience that a brand’s employees can reach is often much larger than the brand’s own audience.”

Percolate offers services that make it easier for brands to share their social content with employees, who can then reshare it. Brier adds, “Bringing employees and the brand together is a good thing. If the brand’s content is engaging, it can even become a source of pride for employees.”