Employee advocacy on social media has been making headlines lately as one of the top tools for businesses to boost their conversions. Employees spend about 8 hours a week on their phones for non-work related things — How do you motivate staff to use social media to benefit your business? With an enticing employee advocacy program! Don’t have one yet? Start with reading this blog post that lays out how to build a social media advocacy program and how your business will benefit from it!
If you’ve already taken the time to build an employee advocacy or social selling program but haven’t had much success in getting your team to use it, keep reading.
1. Make it Easy
Your employee advocacy program shouldn’t feel like more work. Where’s the fun in that? Motivate your staff to use social media by making it as easy as possible. There are a few key things you can do to help:
- Make posts easy to find
- Minimize the number of steps needed to share content
- Create fun and engaging content that they WANT to share
Ways to make it easy include creating a central hub, like an advocacy board or a designated channel, on whatever collaboration tool your business uses. That way, the content you want to share is readily available. Another option is to post the links directly to your own social media, such as LinkedIn, so all your team needs to do is share it from there.
Finally, if you’re creating good content (which you should be!), they’ll want to share it anyway! You don’t want your employees to cringe or feel like they’re selling out by posting branded content. If you need a hand with creating great blog posts or social media posts that add value to your readers’ (and employees’) lives, get in touch with us today.
2. Provide Tips and Training
If employees aren’t comfortable using social media or are new to the game, getting them to start is as easy as providing tips and training. Not only does it benefit you by setting boundaries for their advocacy social media use, but it also gives them the confidence they need to get started. Don’t assume everyone knows the ins and outs of social media best practices just because they have a LinkedIn account.
Some areas that training can help with include:
- Where to find the content you want shared
- How often to post
- The best times to post
- Suggested hashtags
- Suggested captions
- Best social media channels for posts
- Optimizing posts and profiles
The tricky thing with social media is that the algorithms that power post visibility also change throughout the year, affecting the above aspects. You can host training sessions or provide your team with new hashtags, captions, and keywords throughout the year. This can also serve as a friendly reminder to post if they haven’t lately!
3. Give Them a Reason
A crucial part of establishing employee advocacy on social media is creating a program where nobody feels forced to participate. Give them a few reasons it’s worth their time. After all, they’re putting their names on the line and using their platforms to help you build yours. Here are a few ways to give them a reason to join the program:
- They’ll develop their own platform and voice as an industry leader
- You can create a reward program to help build incentive
- Provide robust and inspiring content that they’ll want to share
4. Show Them the Results
If you’re asking for employee advocacy on social media, you need to be able to show them that it works. While we’ve talked about KPIs and measuring the success of your employee advocacy tool for your own business, it can also be super motivating for your team to see the benefits too! Forbes suggests looking at the results collectively. Just like you’re tracking your own KPIs, you can show your team things like an increase in engagement with the company page as more members of your team start sharing posts.
Look for those parallels that show a crossover win between your team’s engagement and your social media KPIs.
5. Celebrate Your Advocates
Showing your team the benefit of the advocacy social media program also means you can celebrate the wins together! Not only will sharing the results (as suggested above) help motivate more of your employees to get started but celebrating your top performers will also help them feel like their efforts are appreciated. Successful advocates can be a massive benefit to your business. They help boost your brand recognition and reliability and can also set an excellent example for their coworkers. If you want to motivate your staff to use social media as part of your employee advocacy efforts, be sure to celebrate the ones who already do!
A little recognition goes a long way… a thank-you note, a name callout in the company newsletter, a lunch on the house, or a gift card to a popular retailer!
Employee advocacy can significantly benefit your business and your staff if executed well. When messaging comes from employees instead of companies, you can increase brand recognition and trust and convert more leads! There are a plethora of reasons to start an advocacy program. After all, if you’re not encouraging your staff to use social media and other ways to connect digitally, you’re missing out on leveraging a massive network to extend your brand’s reach. You just need to motivate your staff the right way!
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