The secret sauce to making your teams go “relevantly” social. The heroes of the game are the Advocates; unless they are treated as heroes, the rest will fall to the wayside. And here’s what we think from our experience that makes employee advocacy to work better.
- Get leadership involvement and action into this advocacy program. This is probably the first and the most important step to kick start it.
- Set your objectives – what you want to get out of it and match it with the advocate audiences who fulfils the criteria. For example, if it’s about reach or leads from a brand and business perspective, then the people networks that are connected to your brand’s audience type are the people participating in the program. Not everyone in the company.
- Focus on advocate’s content needs and interests. This is not about blasting your own content and expecting rewards. So you’ve got to play the smart tricks to bring in business related content that people would love to share. And those could be from any source.
- Find ways to make employees to treat this advocacy platform as their own library for reading and absorbing on-topic content. This could become their go-to source for content which you can share on your social media profiles via the app.
- The ease of finding and sharing is what makes this advocacy platform powerful. And that’s precisely what helps advocates to build their personal brand and voice. An important pointer, it needs to be supplemented with constant encouragement for active networking within their channels.
- Your own brand and product content is also curated and made available. Advice advocates to mix their sharing (our own and external) and that will make it interesting for your networks and encourage people to connect with you.
- Too many shares in a day is not good for your social channels. So advice your advocates to keep it to one share per channel, per day. Except Twitter, where the tempo is good.
Now, watch out for the following snakes too. They do more harm than good.
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Sharing is good. Oversharing is BAD!
More than two posts in a day in one channel? You are flagging yourself to the algorithms as a spammer (except twitter)
- Twitter: 5-6 posts in a day is okay.
- Linkedin: 1 post a day (max two)
- Facebook: 1 post or less (frequent business posts are not meant for your personal handles). It’s okay once in a while. However, you can share interesting videos etc once a day. Not the serious stuff.
Schedule your posts and distribute it across channels. Do keep a close watch on the number of shares.
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Employee Advocacy is a content tool first, marketing tool second
NOT a hard selling tool. It’s a hybrid sales tool. It will deliver awesome results over
a period of time. Hype does not deliver at all.
Cut the self(branded content) promotion. No one likes you if you shout about yourself. So first encourage your advocates to consume the content. Create a library of interesting content. For eg, ‘Check out the Tedx videos?’, ‘Read some of Seth’s blogs?’, ‘Read about Zooming contact lens’ and many more…
Interesting things are happening in the world around us and that’s why people want to engage with us. So consume it first and CUT the number of brand promotion posts. Your network will appreciate you as a person with ideas. Not just a promoter of your business brand alone.
So share out interesting ideas.
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DO NOT Blind Share
Sharing without your own opinion/comment is considered bad manners in social.
So please make it a point to add your point of view or feedback on each share that you do. So, you have to first go through the content and find it interesting in the first place.
You will find three dots on the top right of each content piece. Click on that and you will find a prompt ‘Add comment’. Use it and type out your opinion, add topic hashtags too. Say it loud on social. Share it. Be Proud!
Feedbacks are most welcome. Especially what you think on the content mix and any recommendations you might have on the content.
If you are interested in learning more about Advocacy, click here.