Tag Archives for " advocacy "

How to Make Social Advocacy Part of Your Employees’ Daily Routine

Your employees each have a morning ritual. Grab a cup of coffee. Scroll through Facebook’s News Feed. Respond to emails. Dial into a conference call. Start the workday.

What if your company could become a part of employees’ daily routines? What if there was a way for you to use this downtime to inform others and increase brand awareness?

Welcome employee social advocacy! By tapping into a daily habit that already exists, you can create social advocacy and amplify your marketing efforts.

According to a 2016 survey from Bambu by Sprout Social, seven in ten employees are using social media at work. Blocking popular networks and monitoring browsing history isn’t going to stop anyone from checking Facebook—especially when 11 percent of those surveyed admitted to using social media during bathroom breaks.

Instead of trying to fight a habit that’s already ingrained in your workplace culture, embrace it! Encourage your employees to use their time on social to speak on your brand’s behalf. By outlining the individual benefits, identifying existing champions, and educating and empowering employees, you can strategically build a powerful advocacy program.

 

Answering the Question: What’s In It for Me?

One of the biggest hurdles in getting people involved in an advocacy program is convincing them that there’s a personal benefit. Before you introduce a formal or informal program, you need to answer the frequently asked question, “What’s in it for me?”.

The best way to do this is by not only communicating but also demonstrating the benefits of sharing company content on social.

Collect and share testimonials from sales representatives who have seen an increase in revenue by sharing curated content. Who has had success at positioning themselves as thought leaders within the marketplace? Identify a new employee who learned about the position through a social post.

If these use cases aren’t applicable, try surveying engaged employees to learn what they think is most valuable.

Additionally, you need to demystify the idea using social media at work negatively impacts productivity. Believe it or not, four in five people believe that.

Sure, there’s always going to be the 10 percent of surveyed employees who spend over two hours on social. However, a vast majority spend less than an hour scrolling through their feeds.

You may want your employees to hit the ground running sharing your awesome content, but that may not happen right away. What’s most important, initially, is that your employees are reading the information you’re posting. You want them to experience a more transparent and forthcoming workplace.

 

Identifying and Educating Existing Internal Advocates

Do a quick search on Instagram of your office location and a Twitter query of your branded hashtag. These employees are your initial allies and should be the first group of stakeholders you bring into your employee advocacy initiatives.

That’s what Katie Gear, Area E-Commerce Marketing Manager for Hyatt hotels in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, did when she first launched her advocacy efforts. Gear spoke with Sprout Social’s Community Outreach Manager, Sarah Nagel, about how she scaled her program and identified its first participants.

“Harness employees who are already sharing. Create a more meaningful conversation with their employer, and keep the dialogue they’re already participating in more open-ended,” Gear told Nagel.

Gear identified these brand advocates by searching social and approaching directors in sales and marketing. She asked them who from their teams would be a good fit. 54 percent of those surveyed responded that they don’t have a lot of guidance on how to use social media to advocate for their company.

To address this, Gear followed up by hosting informal social media 101 classes for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

“The courses help them understand what I’m doing with the content and what I look for—and what content works best on what channel,” Gear told Nagel.

So, first, identify and then educate existing internal advocates to help you implement a more effective employee advocacy program. Leverage this highly engaged focus group for feedback. Lean on their insights to help revise your efforts before rolling it out to a larger audience.

 

Empowering Your Employees

Participants in your program shouldn’t view engaging with company news and relevant content as extra work—otherwise, they won’t opt-in.

In fact, 53 percent of employees surveyed don’t think that the marketing team makes it easy for them to advocate for the company on social media. Don’t make engaging with your brand more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Along with internal education on social media best practices, you need to streamline the sharing process and provide your employees with all the tools they need to be the best advocates possible.

When you’re sharing social content with your team, try this:

• Accompany each post with suggested social messaging per each popular network.
• Include a note with each piece of content that tells why what you’re sharing is important and who the internal stakeholders involved with the initiatives are.
• If you’re citing a third-party source, make sure you’re highlighting a reputable publication.
• Make sure that you’re asking your team members to share content and information that they think would resonate with all of the company’s employees or a departmental audience. Employee engagement, just like social media, should be a two-way dialogue.

 

Quantifying Employee Advocacy Success

Strategizing and implementing an employee advocacy program takes time and resources. Be sure that you’ll be able to measure the impact of your efforts. Adding UTM codes to the end of each piece of owned content you share with employees will make it easy to track, measure, and benchmark.

Some of the same social metrics you apply to your marketing efforts can be applied to your advocacy initiatives.

Keep in mind that those surveyed were 16 times more likely to read a social media post from a friend than from a brand. 81 percent of participants went as far as saying they would rather see a friend’s social post than a brand’s post.

Keep a close eye on your efforts, and continue to use the data and anecdotal feedback you receive to revise and refresh your program.

 

Cheers to Your Advocacy Leaders!

As your program gains momentum, your employees will see that advocating on social media isn’t as confusing or hard as they may think. Be sure to start out with a proper framework and approach. Getting your employees to incorporate advocacy into their daily routines can be a seamless and mutually beneficial process.

This post was originally written by Andrew Caravella and updated by Michelle Saunders in 2021.

The post How to Make Social Advocacy Part of Your Employees’ Daily Routine appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Employee Advocacy Program

According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in organizations and every category has plummeted across the board, especially in comparison to other years. But one of the few areas that remains one of the most trusted sources of information? People.

That means when it comes to building trust and gaining your audiences’ attention, your employees are your greatest asset, and it’s even better when they can advocate on your behalf.

But you can’t just put an employee advocacy program in place and hope for the best. Instead, follow a few do’s and don’ts to help make efforts more successful.

 

DO start with your goals for employee advocacy

Why exactly are you trying to kickstart your organization’s employee advocacy efforts?

Before you go all-in on getting employee advocacy off the ground and getting everyone involved, make sure you understand exactly how employee advocacy fits into your current content marketing and social media efforts.

For example, are you hoping employee advocacy will:

• Provide a surround sound effect by amplifying key brand messages and efforts?
• Reinforce your brand’s commitment to authenticity by using real, genuine voices?
• Reach even more people with messages shared by more messengers?

Whatever your goals are, make sure you solidify them before you jump in. It also doesn’t hurt to make them S.M.A.R.T:

• S: Specific – What exactly will be accomplished?
• M: Measurable – What are you measuring, and how?
• A: Actionable – Is the goal realistic? Can you actually accomplish it?
• R: Relevant – How does this goal ladder up to the big picture for your organization?
• T: Time-bound – When do your goals need to be accomplished?

 

DON’T assume everyone is on the same page

It’s one thing to create an employee advocacy program, but it’s another to participate in one.

While you may understand exactly what employee advocacy efforts look like based on your S.M.A.R.T. goals, you can’t assume the same for everyone else.

But you can help them better understand by creating and documenting clear guidelines that help explain:

• What employee advocacy is and looks like for your company
• What you want to accomplish with their participation (i.e., your S.M.A.R.T. goals)
• What’s in it for them for participating (e.g., become a thought-leader, raise visibility for things they’re
• excited about working on, promoting skills and talents, etc.)
• How all of this will come to life and get done

While this document can’t and won’t answer every question they have, it should give them a very good idea of what employee advocacy efforts look like for your organization.

And when it comes to putting the document together, keep it simple. It should be skimmable, scannable, and easy for them to digest.

 

DO provide multiple ways for employees to be advocates

How fantastic would it be if every single employee had the extra time and drive to create beautifully written thought-leadership articles, develop attention-grabbing LinkedIn updates, or share and comment on every single social media post your organization publishes?

Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

That’s why you need to have several, different options available to get the most participation with employee advocacy efforts.

• Maybe an employee can only create one thought-leadership article per quarter. Great!
• Maybe someone only has enough bandwidth to react to a Facebook post. Awesome!
• Maybe a team member is more comfortable consistently sharing branded posts. Fantastic!

Not every employee has to be 100% all-in and onboard with being your brand’s megafan to participate in employee advocacy efforts. That’s not the point of employee advocacy efforts.

The point is for employees to advocate in genuine and authentic ways, and those ways look different for everyone. So, provide multiple different options for getting involved (if they’re interested in participating, of course).

 

DON’T expect employees to add advocacy efforts on top of their to-do list

Let’s face it: the pandemic has left pretty much the entire workforce over-stressed and rethinking their entire work life and career. As NPR found:

“As pandemic life recedes in the U.S., people are leaving their jobs in search of more money, more flexibility, and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time.”

Bottom line: You cannot have an employee advocacy program if your employees don’t feel valued. And asking them to advocate on behalf of your company by adding to their already-overwhelming to-do lists and never-ending tasks will absolutely not help.

Instead, depending on their level of involvement, let them know they’re able to participate in employee advocacy efforts by giving them the time and resources to do so…not just another to-do so they feel even more overwhelmed.

 

DO communicate regularly and consistently

Employee advocacy efforts are not a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie. You can’t just “Set it and forget it!”, even if that is the best tagline ever created.

You have to communicate regularly for efforts to work, especially after the initial excitement and rush of employee advocacy participation starts to wane.

To keep everyone motivated and encourage ongoing efforts:

• Provide regular status updates: Include updates on efforts, what the team has accomplished, and how much their participation has helped toward the goals set. Also, be sure to ask for feedback and open the floor to new ideas, too.
• Use advocacy tools to push content to employees: Adopt tools that can help you push messages, requests, and content to advocates, such as Bambu. But no matter which tool you use, make sure it’s user-friendly and can be easily adopted by anyone.
• Be clear and direct with advocacy asks: Need a specific event amplified on social media? Want more people to share the latest blog post? Need someone to write a thought-leadership article? Ask them directly, be specific with what you need them to do, and make sure they have all the information they need to participate.

Employee advocacy efforts are not a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie. You can’t just “Set it and forget it!”.Click To Tweet

 

Do It Together!

In the end, employee advocacy is a powerful tool that can help you harness the power of your team’s genuine, authentic and real voices. Putting a few safeguards in place, and following a few simple do’s and don’ts, you can take your efforts from just so-so to so successful.

The post Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Employee Advocacy Program appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com