It’s inevitable that employees will be sharing on social media and in fact, many companies are now investing resources to encourage their workforce to get online. Yet, the concept of getting employees active on social media or “employee advocacy” is not new and has been a growing marketing strategy for the last few years.
While there are a lot of benefits of encouraging employees to share via social media, it can also be a bit nerve-racking at first. However, to grow in the 21st century, leadership needs to get over that fear and recognize the power social media has in shaping their business.
However, if you are activating employees currently or considering it, there is still one other aspect you need to prepare for: you do not want everyone posting the exact same message or worse, constantly pushing a sales agenda on their networks.
Instead of seeing a positive affect, your workforce will be known as a bunch of spam-bots. Not what you want for the company you work for or for the company branding. However, this can be avoided if you follow the below tips.
Before Anything, Provide Clear Social Media Policy Guidelines
You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many companies still do not have a simple social media guideline in place or do not make it easy for employees to find (if they do have one).
Whether your company actively encourages social media advocacy or not, employees will be at some point engaging on social media. That could be on their company computer or via their mobile device while at work.
Because of that, you need a social media policy that is clear and simple. As well as easily accessible for employees and new hires to access at any point (not buried in a huge employee handbook). If you are encouraging employees to be on social, they need to not feel afraid to get involved and a policy will ensure they know their company’s stance.
Your ultimate goal is to build a sense of trust with your team and providing clear and accessible guidelines from the start will help ensure that.
Host Internal Social Media Training Workshops
Everyone is at a different level when it comes to their experience using social media or knowledge of particular platforms. If you are engaging in employee advocacy and getting employees on social, providing some training will be crucial.
This should not be required workshops, but be open to those interested in learning and understanding the best practices. These workshops, however frequent your company has them, will be good to teach the basics and ensuring no one is spamming or accidentally harassing their networks with sales agenda messages.
Additionally, by creating a unique training that allows for feedback and questions, you ensure your workforce outside of marketing is educated on social and is prepared to get involved if they so choose.
Create Interesting and Educational Content
A big challenge companies have, is there content is just not very good. By that I mean, it’s short, very general, or every post sounds like a sales pitch for your company’s product or service. With weak content, your company is already setting up your corporate accounts to be spammy, but also employees who might be interested in sharing on behalf of the company.
Do you constantly want to see your connections promoting and sharing a product or service every day? All it does it make you scroll past it faster, ignore it or even remove them as a connection.
This is where having a content strategy in place that has sufficient research done on your audience…
