As every marketing and social media professional knows, encouraging employees to share company content is challenging. You try to do your best to overcome those challenges because you know that increasing the reach and engagement of your company’s messages leads to better web traffic, leads and conversion rates. Since we’re here to help, we’ve collected the most common problems with employee advocacy and tips on how to solve them.
Lack of Executive Sponsorship
If you’re seeing a low number of shares and engagements by co-workers on your company’s social media posts, does that concern your boss? If not, they need to know the importance of employee advocacy on key company metrics.
Educate your bosses on how employee advocacy has the potential to boost business results using an untapped channel - your coworkers. Then request that they champion employee advocacy initiatives and encourage everyone to participate.
No Cohesive Strategy
Do you have an employee advocacy initiative once in a while or is it a documented, ongoing program that includes goals, tactics and measurement? If you really want to drive results, you know where I’m going with this.
Start with a metrics-driven approach to documenting the current status, setting goals and outlining the actions needed to reach those goals. Metrics should include the current reach and engagement results from each social media network and the increase (monthly, quarterly, yearly) you intend to achieve with the program. Next, describe the actions that will be taken, who’s responsible for each task and the due dates.
Make sure you include updated social media guidelines for your employees so they are amplifying the right content, the right way. These guidelines will also help them feel more confident when posting company messages.
Since employee advocacy and social media are inextricably linked, incorporate your employee advocacy programs and strategies within your overall social media marketing strategy.
Employees Don’t Understand How it Benefits Them
If you don’t explain the “what’s in it for me”, employees will not take the time and energy away from their day-to-day responsibilities to help you amplify company messages. Show them how becoming employee advocates helps them build their personal brands, reinforces a professional image and opens up more career opportunities within their companies and industries. If this type of communication comes from your senior executives, it will have much more impact.
Bad User Experience
We recently asked marketers for their employee advocacy recommendations and their number one tip was to make it as easy and fast as possible for employees to find and distribute company content. That means finding a way to update them about company messages using a messaging platform that’s already part of their work routine and making sure your updates are not clogging up their email inboxes.
Another way to improve their user experience is to look at all the steps that employees need to take with the current process you have in place, remove as many steps as possible and make sure you’re delivering a consistent experience across devices.
An employee advocacy platform can be a big help in providing the ideal user experience.
Expensive Applications
Speaking of employee advocacy solutions, there are quite a few options available. However, most of them are very costly, which negatively impacts ROI and puts too much burden on your marketing budget. When evaluating employee advocacy solutions, check out Please Share. Our customers rave about our platform and love our pricing!
No Creative Control for Employees
Another problem with many employee advocacy applications is that they don't allow users to customize posts. Employees want to post something unique that reflects their perspective rather than parroting the company message. Make sure that the platform you choose lets employee advocates modify or add to the original message so that they can communicate in their own voice, sound authentic and make the message more relevant to their followers.
Low (or Dropping) Adoption Rates
No matter how well you’ve planned your employee advocacy program, your employee participation rates will drop unless you refresh and revitalize it. To keep up the excitement, you need to continuously reward and motivate participation. There are a number of ways to maintain and increase adoption rates:
- Get your company executives to send out a company-wide communication reminding employees that it’s important for them to participate
- Make sure that new hires get involved by including the topic of employee advocacy in onboarding programs
- Bring out employees’ sense of competition by posting leaderboard results and holding periodic contests for the top participants
- Set a company-wide goal for employee advocacy and make a donation to a popular charity when the goal is achieved
- Periodically recognize advocacy efforts in company communications.
Problems with Employee Advocacy Solved - With Please Share
Employee advocacy is a fundamental aspect of marketing, but brands still struggle with implementing a successful program. We understand these challenges and have developed a new, fun, cost-effective way for employees to share company content directly from Slack. Try Please Share for 14 days for free and put an end to common employee advocacy problems.