8 Ways to Encourage Employees to Share Your Content on Social Media
So you’ve done a great job launching your employee advocacy program. You’ve established your goals, gained the buy-in of both employees and management—and successfully completed your pilot program. But once the initial excitement has faded, you notice that employees aren’t sharing as much as before.
So how do you encourage employees to share your content on social media?
We’re here to list all the ways to preserve the momentum in your employee advocacy program.
1. Recognition is the Name of the Game
We all want to feel that our efforts are being recognized and valued by our managers. Employee advocacy is no exception to this rule. So before you turn to tangible incentives—which can be very effective, no doubt—make sure that employees know their advocacy efforts are noticed and appreciated.
There are multiple ways to do that. You can highlight this week’s or month’s top advocates in an email newsletter and showcase their success stories. It can be a personal email from their manager thanking them for their effort.
You can even ask your top advocate to present their social media strategy to other employees in advocacy-dedicated roundtables or training sessions. Every form of recognition will do wonders and encourage employees to share your content on social media.
2. Incentivize Your Employees and Gamify Your Advocacy Program
Recognition is definitely a key element in encouraging employees to share your content on social media. However, combining recognition with tangible incentives can also go a long way in boosting content sharing.
The incentives don’t have to be on a grand scale. It can be an Amazon voucher, a pair of movie tickets, or an extra vacation day for top employee advocates. One of our clients actually used cupcakes to incentivize its employees to share.
Gamification also plays a major role here. Leaderboards can help get employees excited about advocacy and motivate them to become top advocates. Determine your success metrics in advance— for B2B brands, these will most likely be clicks and conversions.
Basing off of those metrics, you can turn advocacy into a contest, sending out weekly updates on the leading advocates.
3. Tailor the Advocacy Program to Employees’ Needs
It’s a simple formula: if the content does not resonate with your co-workers, they won’t share it.
Employees are looking for content they could share about their company and their work, and they know which content would be compelling for their networks. This is why advocacy is all about creating a unique, personal voice on social media, and not just echoing the brand’s content.
To ensure that you’re creating content employees would want to share, ask yourself whether it provides value to them and their audiences. You can even do a survey to uncover their content preferences.
Once you’ve determined your content strategy, analytics will help you measure how well your content is doing. If employees aren’t sharing specific types of content, move away from those kinds of articles and seek more engaging topics and formats.
Another way to personalize an advocacy program is by segmenting content by topics. Product managers might be more interested in sharing content on a cool new feature they helped launch, while HR would be more inclined to post a press release about a great new hire for the company.
Being faced with volumes and volumes of content, to which they won’t necessarily be able to relate, will turn advocates away from the program. By segmenting content by topics, you’ll be making it easier for each employee to discover the content they find to be the most engaging—and take part in the program.
4. Get Employees Invested in the Advocacy Program
One of the best ways to encourage employees to share your content on social media is by getting them invested in your advocacy program. How? Show them how much they’re contributing to the program’s success.
There are several ways to do this. One is to provide employees with post-levels analytics, which will show them how each and every post performed. It will reveal how many likes, comments, and shares it garnered, and most importantly- how many clicks and conversions.
Once employees get the data demonstrating their impact on the company’s bottom line, this will motivate them to share more content and get even better results.
Another great way to engage employees is by allowing them to suggest content. Oktopost’s employee advocacy platform recently launched a Content Suggestions feature which allows advocates to add content to the board, pending approval from the program admin.
Employees know their audience best, so it’s only natural to have them contribute articles to the advocacy board.
They don’t expect every single one of their suggestions to get approved. However, the ability to recommend content and actually see some of it on the board will give them a sense of partnership in the program.
5. Lead by Example
The leadership in your organization is key to the success of your employee advocacy program. Your co-workers often look up to the management and follow their example. This makes the practice of leading-by-example more relevant than ever.
To encourage employees to share your content, make sure that the C-level management is on social media, advocating for the company. This is the time to provide proper training to those managers and sustain their advocacy efforts over time. You can work closely with the staff of those executives to establish a social media strategy for them and ensure that the sharing is consistent.
Once your colleagues learn that management is taking part in the employee advocacy program, they’d be happy to follow the lead and share more content as well.
6. Adopt a Platform that Would Make it Effortless to Share and Easy to Personalize
Your employee advocacy platform can make or break your advocacy program.
Ease of use is a major factor when it comes to the adoption of new technology. This is why your best choice would be a platform that makes it effortless for your colleagues to discover content and share it. A mobile app that will make it possible to share content on the go is also essential.
This platform should also allow employees to personalize their posts. It can be advanced scheduling and geotagging features or in-depth analytics that will show them which content performs best. Personalization features will encourage employees to establish their own voice on social media and share more content.
7. Educate and Share Knowledge
For those who are unfamiliar with it, social media can be daunting. Immense amounts of content, instantaneous interaction with other people, and icons and buttons galore—you get how a social media novice can feel overwhelmed.
To onboard your employees to employee advocacy, you have probably conducted training sessions and familiarized employees both with the platform and with social media best practices.
But the education process shouldn’t stop there. Encourage knowledge sharing by having monthly or quarterly roundtables, where advocates can discuss their experience with the program and educate each other on best practices. Learning from their peers’ experience will go a long way in boosting content sharing.
8. Demonstrate to Employees What’s In It For Them
One of the reasons why employees may have stopped sharing your content is they don’t understand how they could benefit from it.
Explaining and demonstrating to employees the benefits of advocacy for them is a major factor in your program’s success. With advocacy, employees can turn into social media thought-leaders and expand their professional networks.
This spells significant career growth for advocates. Unsurprisingly, almost 86% of employee advocates cite the increased social presence as having a positive impact on their career.
Once employees understand how advocacy is beneficial for their careers, that would motivate them to engage and share more content.
Supercharge your Employee Advocacy Program
Employees are a valuable partner when it comes to ensuring the success of your advocacy program. Forget valuable, without them there is no advocacy program. So making them feel recognized, incentivizing them through tangible rewards, or demonstrating the benefits of advocacy for them—these are all effective ways to encourage employees to share your content and make your program a success.
Your employee advocacy platform also plays a major role in the success of your program. To supercharge your employee advocacy program, check out Oktopost’s social employee advocacy platform, with its post-level analytics, on the go sharing, content suggestions functionality and much more!
