Facebook recently launched the profile subscription function, allowing you to receive updates from profiles that you are not friends with.  Users can click on the Subscribe Button on any Profile and they’ll begin seeing updates from that profile in their News Feed. Furthermore, the Subscribe Button can be modified on a per-Profile basis, so that you can choose the type and volume of updates you wish to receive.

Now I wrote yesterday about the Net Promoter Score, and how you can get your employees to be brand ambassadors for you via social media.  I'd like to use this post to expand on that and provide you with 5 steps to turn your employees into traffic generators via the Facebook Subscribe feature.

Step 1 – Ensure you have content to share

This may seem an obvious first step, but if you don't have anything worth sharing then you're done before you've even begun.  Do you blog?  Do you have some great offers to share?  Think about what it is you have that your customers would want.

Step 2 – Identify your brand ambassadors

How many of your employees have a real passion for what you do?  You're looking for people here that are already using social media to talk about the kind of things you do.  They might tweet about it, blog about it, share photos or videos about it.  It's much harder to generate excitement than it is to tap into what already exists.

You want to find people that tick all of these boxes:

• They love what you do
• They have strong networks to tap into
• They trust you, and you trust them to behave well

Step 3 – Be selective

Once you have a group of people that are already excited about what you do it's time to whittle them down to a select group.  After all, not all of them will have suitable Facebook profiles for you to be driving customers to.  You want to find people whose profile is:

• clean
• professional
• polite

These could be from your communications or senior management team, but they could also be people with strong technical knowledge.  Remember that passion and love of social media is as important as status though.

Step 4 – Give them guidance

This shouldn't be too prescriptive but they should know what you expect from them.  I personally like the Zappos social media policy

"Be real and use your best judgement."

The reality is however that this stage will depend largely on the culture of your own organisation.  Take a look at your company's culture, and use that to inform your social media policy.

Step 5 – Give them content

You made sure you were creating great content in step 1, now you need to ensure your ambassadors have easy access to it.  Ambassadors should be encouraged to post company content as and when it’s published on the website.

Step 6 – Measure

Ok, I know I said 5 steps, but you have to measure how you're doing, whether people are subscribing, whether they're clicking through and interacting with the content your ambassadors are putting out.  So make sure you measure progress and tweek things accordingly.  There isn't a one size fits all strategy for this so experimentation will be required.

Most of all though, have fun.  I mean going to work is fun for you, right?