We recently interviewed 20+ marketers on how they encourage colleagues to share company news and messages on their individual social media accounts. The top recommendation was “make it easy” for employees to participate in content distribution. But what does that mean and how do you create an easy employee advocacy customer experience?
Let’s look at this challenge through the customer experience lens. Since you are asking employees to take action, think of them as your customer. You need to deliver a great employee advocacy customer experience for them so that they will share company messages now and make it a habit to do so going forward. Hopefully, they’ll tell colleagues about their experience and encourage them to participate as well.
To deliver a great experience, CX professionals look for ways to remove friction. Friction is anything that comes between the user and the action you want them to take. In the e-commerce world, cutting out friction from the customer experience improves conversion rates as much as 66%.
For B2B marketers, an example of friction is every click, field to be filled out and other steps needed for a prospect to download an ebook. For employee advocacy, it’s all the time spent and steps needed for your colleagues to share company news and marketing content. To remove friction points, follow these three steps:
1) Review the Process of Sharing Content
Put yourself in the shoes of one of your employees and review the steps you would need to take – beginning with when you see marketing’s request and continuing until the content is shared on a social media account. Does it look something like this?
- Read marketing’s request (i.e., “Please distribute this news on your social media channels”, along with a URL for the website, article or other page)
- Copy the text and the URL
- Open a new browser tab and go to LinkedIn
- From the LinkedIn homepage, click on Start a post
- Paste the text and the URL
- Optionally, add your own copy
- Click post
- Review your post
- Go back to marketing’s request and follow similar steps for Twitter (adding another 8-9 steps to the process)
Now think about how much time this takes, considering that your employee has many other responsibilities that have a much higher priority for her.
2) Reduce Steps, Remove Friction
With automation included in an employee advocacy platform, you can eliminate many of these steps. With Please Share, for example, you can significantly reduce the number of steps (assuming employees share posts on both LinkedIn and Twitter) down to four steps – that take just a few seconds to complete.
Make sure that the platform you choose is easy to learn and use so that you’re not introducing another source of friction in your quest to simplify employee advocacy. Also, check to see if the platform provides easy ways to get help if employees get stuck on any part of the process. At Please Share, the menu (or overflow) button is always available and shows users how to get help. Although our Slack app is brilliantly simple and easy to use, we anticipate issues and make it easy to learn how to use the platform with videos and FAQs.
3) Provide a Consistent Experience Across Devices
Another way to reduce friction is to allow your employees to take action wherever and whenever they can, and not restrict employee advocacy to regular work hours while they are at their desk. If a mobile experience is available, it must be identical to what’s on their desktop so that employees don’t have to go through another learning curve. Since Please Share is designed for Slack, it can be used by employees on the mobile Slack app to share content at any time, whenever they have a few seconds to participate in employee advocacy.
Final Comments
To make it easy and fast for employees to share company news, look for ways to remove friction in the employee advocacy customer experience. By using an employee advocacy platform that is super simple to learn and use and works wherever Slack is available, your employees can make it a habit to take a few seconds out of their day to share content and drive higher views and conversion rates.
If you’re ready to provide your employees with a better customer experience, sign up for the Please Share beta today.