Expert Insight Series: Wendy van Gilst, Social Media and Content Manager, Sage

Wendy van Gilst is Social Media and Content Manager at Sage’s Customer Business Center in Dublin. In this interview she explains how social media isn’t just her job, but that it has become a key element of business activity for all Sage employees, in all departments.

This is the first in a series of interviews with professionals who are driving digital transformation in a range of industries, and who are experts in their field.

1) Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Sage

It’s really exciting to be part of Sage, since it’s a very social company. Our CEO, Stephen Kelly, believes that social media is the way forward for businesses. This means we invest a lot of time and effort in social media. In my spare time I blog and vlog about social media and health for my blog and my YouTube channel. I’m very lucky to be in this exciting role at Sage and really enjoy sharing my knowledge and experience in my blogs and vlogs.

2) Why has social media become essential to departments outside of marketing and sales?

Today everybody is a social seller. Every employee is the face of the company. Customers and prospects are very active online, so there is a good change they will land on the social media profile of an employee who is not in sales.

This means everybody needs to have a good online brand and needs to share relevant and engaging content. And besides this, your online personal brand helps you to build relationships, position yourself as an industry experts and, ultimately, sell more products or get a promotion faster!

3) How have you seen social media being applied in different departments of your company outside of marketing and sales?

Social media is a part of every department at Sage. Once a month we organize Social Friday, when we offer all Sage employees workshops and training around social media related subjects. This helps all Sage employees to be successful on social media.

We use Sociabble to make sure that Sage employees always have access to relevant and engaging content. We try to make it very easy for employees to share Sage content, but also content that is not directly related to Sage. This helps them to become industry experts, which benefits their personal brand and Sage as a business.

4) How has all of this benefited yourself and your colleagues? Why is important for everyone in the company to engage on social media?

We believe in personal brands. At Sage we want our employees to be the best and most trusted industry experts in our market. This helps our employees to be both more successful and build strong relationships; and, ultimately, to be successful in their career!

We also invest in support and advice on content that our employees can share with their networks. Sociabble therefore helps us to measure how relevant our content is and to improve where needed.

5) How do you think the employee advocacy program has helped boost your company’s overall employee engagement?

We launched Sociabble during a global Social Media Day and since then we have focused on smaller sessions in order to give our employees the support they need. Sociabble is an important part of our advocacy program, as content is the key for success!

We see that most of our colleagues have better social media profiles and share content that is relevant for their network. Stephen Kelly is very focused on driving our advocacy program, which helps us to build on the success of the initiative.

We would like to thank Wendy for collaborating on this blog post. Stay tuned for the next installment in our expert insight series!