We are pleased to announce that Please Share now includes functionality to help companies boost engagement with the updates that they post on LinkedIn and Twitter.
With just a few steps, businesses can add their Twitter handle and/or LinkedIn account to Please Share. Upon doing so, new posts are automatically fetched and sent to a designated Slack channel where employees are free to engage – like, share, comment – with the posts without leaving Slack!
The process of liking and re-sharing posts literally takes about 2 seconds – a modest request even by today’s hectic standards.
A New Way to Think About Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy tools are commonly used as a way for companies to encourage their employees to share news and announcements on social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. This approach extends the amplification or reach of company content (i.e., the more people who share an update, the more people are likely to see it).
After introducing the first employee advocacy solution specifically designed for Slack, we asked ourselves why can’t an employee advocacy solution also be used to improve social media engagement? And that was the impetus behind today’s announcement.
For the past few months, we have quietly beta tested this feature and, to our knowledge, Please Share is the first employee advocacy solution to provide the ability to boost engagement with existing posts.
The Value of Engaging with Posts
The tangible value of encouraging employees to engage with company content typically encompasses some combination of the following points.
- Simply communicating the content that a company posts on social media channels helps employees stay informed about public-facing news, announcements, and events.
- Leveraging employees to engage with posts is often an easier request than asking employees to continuously “share” company content.
- Higher engagement – likes, shares, comments – helps to improve the popularity and awareness of a company’s posts on social media channels.
- And retweeting (on Twitter) or sharing (on LinkedIn) company posts are great ways to extend the reach of a company’s original posts.
How Do Engagement Requests Appear in Slack?
In case you were wondering how engagement requests appear in Slack, here are a few screenshots. Under each post, you will see interactive buttons representing the different engagement actions with a LinkedIn post or a Tweet.
To use the engagement buttons, employees simply sign into their LinkedIn or Twitter accounts through Please Share – a process that just takes a moment – and then begin liking, retweeting/sharing, replying/commenting on individual updates.
Pretty cool if we do say so ourselves.
Feedback from Our Beta Testers
Operating our new engagement functionality in beta for a few months provided an opportunity to collect feedback and make a few noteworthy adjustments. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will use the blog to go into more detail about the following topics...
- Auto deleting posts
- Using @channel and @here
- Setting the right fetcher cadence
- Reporting and statistics
- And automation
Try Our Interactive Demo
We’ve buried the lede a little here, but while staying relatively quiet over the summer, we also built an interactive demo so companies can get a feel for the functionality of Please Share prior to adding it to Slack.
If you’re interested in trying Please Share, the demo is a great place to get started. We are happy to schedule a call and provide a live demo too. A 14-day free trial is included with each new registration.