Your employees’ 9 levels of social media engagement

Throughout my career I’ve been fascinated by how people engage with each other in business.

I’m always up for trying those personality studies and tests to try and figure out my business profile and where I best fit into an organization.

I trained thousands of employees at SAP to build their personal brand online as part of a huge global effort to shift the organization to become a social business.

I noticed that employees broadly fall into different categories of social media maturity, largely driven by the extent to which they network and how digitally active they are with their brand.

What follows is a reflection of seven years’ experience in an area that I feel passionate about—employee social advocacy.

I’ve broadly mapped employees to a model that looks at the extent to which they network against their level of social activity. When mapping employees to such a model it’s easier to target the right developmental steps to help them advance—if they so wish.

Generally speaking, the higher you are in the model the more connections you are likely to have and the more actively you network. Employees that sit further to the right of the model tend to be more socially active—e.g., blogging, tweeting, engaging with influencers.