Webinar:
How to Build Thought Leadership

Welcome and introductions

Camilla, content creator at Ambassify, opens the session and introduces her co-host Elisa, Head of Customer Success at Ambassify. Camilla covers what thought leadership is, what it entails, and the main benefits it brings to a company. Elisa follows with practical, hands-on examples of how to encourage employees and ambassadors to build it, and how Ambassify supports that journey from employee to ambassador to thought leader.

What thought leadership actually means

Thought leadership means that you, as an individual, are seen as the knowledge leader in your field. It reflects how influential your thoughts, your expertise, and your take on specific topics are within your industry.

It plays out mostly on social media. It reflects in the offline world too, but it originates online, because that is where you have access to the widest possible audience and where ideas take hold. That is how you build authority and credibility around a certain topic or within a specific industry.

Thought leadership can be ascribed to an individual, so to you, your CEO, your management team, or your employees. It can also be ascribed to a company, as a measure of how influential your organisation is in its industry and its space. For a business, one of the most effective ways to grow that influence is to help employees develop and showcase their expertise in front of the same target audience you are trying to reach.

Credibility and trust in a market that distrusts advertising

Online users no longer trust advertising or corporate messaging the way they used to. That is exactly why employees are seen as more authentic, and why they can gain authority on social media more easily than a brand page can.

Employees can position both themselves and the company as influential voices in the industry, and earn trust in the process. Trust is a huge factor in purchasing decisions, so that extra layer of credibility and authority matters commercially, not just reputationally.

Brand visibility and engagement

LinkedIn reports that companies with active thought leaders have five times higher brand awareness, and are more likely to be considered for business opportunities. Employees have the power to expand a company's reach, which in turn boosts credibility and visibility. It is considerably more effective than traditional marketing methods.

Engagement follows the same pattern. Employees who are active as thought leaders can get their audience to engage far more easily than a corporate account can. That engagement is invaluable for building connections with clients, with prospects, and with other influencers in the industry.

Qualified leads and competitive advantage

Thought leadership content attracts genuinely interested prospects, and interested prospects lead to a shorter sales cycle. This is one of the clearest ways thought leadership supports social selling and sales directly. The added layer of authenticity that comes from an employee makes the whole process more credible.

There is also a differentiation argument. Companies that position their employees as thought leaders stand out from competitors who rely solely on traditional marketing. 89% of B2B marketers say their success is linked to high-quality content that positions their brand as a thought leader.

From ambassador to thought leader, a natural progression

It all starts with advocacy. As an ambassador, an employee already has a level of commitment to the company that makes them willing to go the extra mile. That is why companies can trust the employees who are already ambassadors to want to take the next step.

Ambassadors are also further along than they realise. They already share company content, and they are already familiar with expressing their experience, their expertise, and their opinions about the company and the industry online. That makes building a personal brand much easier.

The progression tends to run in three stages:

1. Advocacy. Professionalising the LinkedIn profile, sharing company content, and finding a brand voice.
2. Personal brand. Shaping that voice with company content plus their own expertise, and becoming gradually more confident about expressing knowledge on social media.
3. Thought leadership. Building authority as a knowledge leader and showcasing expertise on subject matter, which in parallel grows brand awareness, visibility, and reach for the company.

The transition between these stages is smooth and natural, especially when it is supported by the right tools and the right platform.

Give ambassadors more than one caption to choose from

Elisa takes over with the first practical area: content variation.

In Ambassify, admins can create multiple share messages for the same piece of content. That lets ambassadors choose the message that resonates most with their personal style, or works best for their audience. Encouraging them to personalise it further means they share in their own tone of voice, from a perspective that feels authentic to them.

A good rule of thumb is to provide at least three different options for each piece of content. It makes it easier for ambassadors to pick what suits them, and it ensures diversity among the captions so not everyone is posting the same words at the same time. If you are ever short on ideas, the AI assistant can generate a good caption quickly. Beyond captions, you can also vary the image, the title, and the content preview.

More importantly, offering variations pushes ambassadors to consider different angles and ask which one matches their own point of view. That question is central to thought leadership.

One note on quality. As an administrator or community manager, the time and effort you put into writing good captions shows. Choose quality over quantity.

Reward the ambassadors who write their own

One Ambassify customer takes this a step further by actively encouraging employees to post their own custom captions.

They run what is effectively the same campaign in two versions. The pre-written option is worth 5 points. The do-it-yourself option, where the ambassador writes their own personalised caption, is worth 30 points.

That gap incentivises ambassadors to contribute their own thoughts and perspectives, which strengthens their position as thought leaders. It also increases the authenticity of the shares and makes the content more relatable and more impactful for their networks.

Turn employees' own posts into campaigns

You can take engagement one step further by rewarding ambassadors with points when they write and post their own content on social media. Create a form campaign in Ambassify and ask them to paste the link to their original post.

What makes this powerful is what happens next. As an admin, you can leverage that content again by creating a new campaign in the community asking other ambassadors to engage with the post, whether that means leaving likes, adding comments, or resharing it themselves.

This gives the employee's post far more visibility. It also builds community and support within the ambassador network, and drives more engagement overall.

Member campaigns, letting ambassadors run their own

Member campaigns are a feature that lets ambassadors take an even more active role in the community by creating their own campaigns inside it.

They can use it to share knowledge, post announcements, or ask for likes and comments on their personal social media posts. Elisa used it herself: she posted on LinkedIn about a customer session, then created a member campaign asking her fellow ambassadors and colleagues to engage with that post.

Educate them, in the platform and in person

If you want to help ambassadors write better posts and become more effective thought leaders, offer them education. There are two ways to do it.

The first is directly in the Ambassify community through educational campaigns. These can include guides, best practices for social media posts, advice on improving LinkedIn posts or profiles, videos, and quizzes. There is a dedicated campaign type for quizzes. A content catalogue with ready-made educational campaigns is also in development.

The second is in person. Ambassify runs interactive workshops that give ambassadors hands-on experience, personalised feedback, and more confidence in their content-sharing efforts. Getting ambassadors to post is the first step, and default share messages help them do it, but they still need to learn. If you notice something as a community manager that could be better, an in-person session is a good setting to share that feedback openly. Not everyone is a content creator, and not everyone is at the same level with social media skills, so support and guidance make a real difference.

Activating leadership with auto share

You can also encourage your leadership to become more active on social media by preparing specific campaigns and tailored posts for them. That makes it easier for leaders to engage with their audiences without spending much time creating content from scratch.

Auto share is the feature that supports this. It can be enabled for a selective audience, so as an admin you decide who is allowed to auto share. If you have members who want to share on LinkedIn but do not have time to do it themselves, a community manager can prepare and curate the posts for them, effectively ghostwriting.

The member still has to enable auto share on their own profile, which takes two clicks. From then on, every campaign the community manager launches specifically for that person is shared automatically through smart share, and the member does not have to think about being active on social.

Elisa shared an example of a personalised post aimed at one person, her colleague Rick, promoting a webinar he was about to host. The campaign contained a personalised caption written for him, and with auto share enabled it publishes without him lifting a finger.

Recommended reading

For more examples, inspiration, best practices, and concrete campaign ideas, download the ebook How to Stimulate Thought Leadership with Ambassify.

It is structured in three parts. Thought Leadership 101 covers what it means to be a thought leader, what is in it for your company, and what is in it for the employees who want to become one. From Employees to Thought Leaders explains why helping employees grow into that role benefits you, and goes deeper into how the benefits discussed here actually materialise. The final part dives into hands-on examples, of which there are far more than a single webinar can cover.

Closing thoughts

Thought leadership is not built by the brand page. It is built by people who feel supported enough to put their expertise into their own words.

Give your ambassadors the options, the incentives, the education, and the tools, and the transition from employee to advocate to thought leader takes care of itself.