We are excited to announce that we have completed an overhaul of the reporting capabilities within Please Share. Available to all customers, the new functionality is designed to provide more insights on a company’s employee advocacy initiatives, showcase the different types of engagement data collected and reported on, and highlight return on investment using some fun and innovative ways.
What’s New?
When customers log in to the Please Share web application, they will now see a new Reporting menu item (formally Statistics) on the left-hand side of the page. Selecting Reporting reveals four different types of reports: Overview, Engagement Requests, Share Requests, and Leaderboard.
We will cover these reports in more detail in future blog posts, but here’s a quick description of each one.
- The Overview page offers a high-level summary of your company’s employee advocacy, content distribution, and social media engagement activities as a result of using Please Share.
- The Engagement Requests report highlights annual and monthly performance details on social media engagement requests (also known as “Feeds”) sent to Slack from Please Share.
- Similar to the Engagement Requests page, the Share Requests report provides annual and monthly performance details on social media (i.e., content distribution) share requests sent to Slack from Please Share.
- And the Leaderboard report displays granular participation details on individual employees and how they have contributed to your company’s employee advocacy initiatives.
Astute readers may have also seen a Configuration page in the screenshot above. This page enables Please Share users to select a local currency and adjust the monetary values associated with specific events (e.g. social media likes) generated from using Please Share.
What Changed?
The reporting capabilities available when we first launched were fairly basic in nature and heavily focused on tracking share request-related details such as clicks and earned media. Last year, we did add reporting capabilities for tracking engagement actions (likes, reshares, comments), but did not have a way to calculate ROI across the many options available to employees when using Please Share.
Updating reports has been on our radar for a while now, but getting this right – and there’s always room for improvement – takes a fair amount of planning. Not only do we need to figure out the UI, but also the calculations, event tracking, database configurations, and system scalability. Oh and then there’s testing – lots and lots of testing.
But if you are an existing Please Share customer who’s looking for the Cliff Notes version of what changed, the new reporting capabilities can generally be summarized in the following points.
- Separated Reports: In the previous version, all reporting was commingled on a single page. This is still true today on the Overview and Leaderboard page, but now Share Requests and Engagement Requests tracking have been separated into their own pages.
- More Details: Within each of the reporting pages, we added more event tracking information. For example, on the Engagement Request page, you can see monthly and annual like counts as well as their corresponding monetary values. And on the Leaderboard page, you can see how many employees have authenticated their LinkedIn or Twitter accounts with Please Share.
- New Monetary Values: Historically, we have provided a way for Please Share admin users to assign a dollar value to each click generated through a share request. This has not gone away in our new reporting, but now users can assign similar values to likes, reshares, comments and more.
- Return on Investment (ROI): We believe that there are many ways to calculate ROI as it relates to your company’s employee advocacy initiatives. Whether you are trying to increase content distribution or improve content engagement, anytime an employee takes some action, he or she is helping the company – and there’s value associated with that. The new reports simplify the process of tracking ROI.
- Individual-Level Reporting: Up until this latest update, all statistics were tracked at an aggregate level across each company. But that only gets you so far. In order to spearhead competition and/or to identify your most noteworthy advocates, Please Share now tracks events – including share request clicks – at an individual level. We will definitely cover this topic in more detail in future blog posts.
How Should I Use These New Reporting Capabilities?
Our initial intention was to use some of the new reports as a way to charge customers a premium, but we reconsidered this position and have made the reports available to all of our customers at no additional cost. Why not include everyone in the party, right?
So you may be wondering, how should I use these new reporting features? Fair question. The answer is largely dependent on your own internal operations and what you may feel are important details to monitor and report upon. Without knowing every customer’s culture (or demanding managers), we venture to make some suggestions. So, without further ado, here are a few ideas on how you can use the new reporting features.
- General Interests: The statistics in Please Share will be there whether you use them or not. If you do not have a strong need to closely monitor performance, simply use the report for your own general knowledge. Why not, right?.
- Share with Your Manager: Managers love statistics – particularly marketing managers. With the new reports in Please Share, you have all kinds of new information, so share them with your superiors so they know what a great job you’re doing – and how coworkers are contributing to promoting your content.
- Track Events and ROI: How are your employee advocacy initiatives paying off? Are they at least covering the costs of our services? We should certainly hope so. But you don’t have to worry about tracking this manually anymore. We calculate ROI on a recurring basis and, hopefully, make you look smart.
- Internal Contests: Sometimes your teammates may need a nudge. Everybody does from time to time. With our Leaderboard report, you can run monthly contests to encourage participants to respond to your share and engagement requests. What incentives you provide to your team and how you run your contest is completely up to you. For us, gift cards to the local coffee shop go a long way.
What’s Planned for the Future?
Though the new reporting capabilities mark a significant milestone for Please Share, there will always be things we can add, adjust and refine. And with feedback from our customers, we will continue to do so. In the near term, however, there are a few additional enhancements that we have begun to work on. The first is to simply add a weekly or monthly email notification that summarizes key performance metrics and the second is a high-priority initiative that, unfortunately, we are not quite ready to share details on just yet. More on that soon.
Track Employee Advocate Social Media Value with Please Share
Please Share makes it super easy to drive value from employee content distribution and engagement. Simply add our app to your company’s Slack workspace, add LinkedIn and/or Twitter feed sources (or send a few share requests to Slack), and then monitor results using our new reporting enhancements.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial.