Continue with Employee advocacy best practices and examples…
Set goals and KPIs for your employee advocacy program
Employees might already be posting about work on their social media feeds. However, without an organized system and clearly defined targets, you have no method of tracking outcomes.
The more clearly you define your goals, the simpler it’ll be for your employees to help. In case your purpose is to improve awareness, encourage employees to post about the brand generally. When you are launching a new product, make shareable content employees could be proud of.
When Hootsuite launched a new training and certification, the employee advocacy social media posts supported the purpose of encouraging registrations.
An advocacy campaign needs to align with at least one of your company’s primary business targets. Then determine which social media metrics to track. These may include share of voice, site traffic, or leads.
Once the campaign has wrapped up, summarize your leads to a report that demonstrates social media return on investment (ROI). Embrace data on general metrics (enhance in reach) as well as employee engagement.
Some key metrics to keep an eye on are:
- Top contributors. Which individuals or teams are sharing the most? Which advocates are generating the most engagement?
- Organic reach. How many people are seeing the content shared via your employee advocates?
- Engagement. Are people clicking links, leaving comments and re-sharing content from your advocates? What’s the engagement per network?
- Traffic. How much traffic did the content shared by employee advocates drive to your site?
However, do not let these targeted employee advocacy campaigns get in the way of more organic employee social shares. Those more informal posts could actually spotlight your tradition. We’re all about#Hootsuitelife and #Hootdogs, too
Establish social media guidelines
Employees need to know not just what the message is, but also the greatest way to communicate it. What type of language should they use? How often should they publish? How should they reply to comments?
An employee advocacy social media policy takes the guesswork out of those and other questions.
Guidelines also help protect your company’s reputation and make sure against legal trouble and security risks. Some guidelines are just common-sense—for example, avoiding vulgar or intolerant language. Others may greatest be left to the legal department.
Ask employees themselves for their input. Engage staff early on to encourage buy-in.
Make the guidelines simple to know and follow. They need to enable advocacy instead of restricting it. Include suggestions on what, where and how to share.
Starbucks posts its employee social media guidelines right on its site. Here are some of the highlights:
- Share your passion, however, do not let social posting get in the way of your job.
- Take the high road, and keep in mind who could see your posts.
- Be clear that you aren’t a company spokesperson and direct media inquiries to the media relations team.
- Do not share future promotions or insider financial info
Lastly, they encourage employees to use #tobeapartner hashtag. This Instagram publishes, from a new manager at a North Carolina location, got 244 Likes from 833 followers. That is an unheard of 29% engagement rate.
Educate employees on social media best practices
Each employee will have a different level of comfort with social media. Begin by getting everybody up to speed on social media greatest practices. This means all employees across all departments and seniority levels. Training everybody on social media generally, as well as on firm policies and guidelines, creates a level playing field.
Frequently offer new and shareable content. This helps employees make consistent social media sharing habits. Offer a mix of fun, shareable content, and industry trends.
Appoint employee advocacy leaders
Firm leaders are often the company’s most visible social media sharers. (At least, till you put an employee advocacy program in place.)
However, they’re often not the most logical leaders of an employee advocacy program. Instead, tap people who are natural social media users, who’re enthusiastic about the firm and the brand. Empower them to help build your employee advocacy program. Engage them in defining and communicating campaigns and targets or making proper incentives.
You might see an initial flurry of social shares once you launch your employee advocacy program. However, without efficient internal leadership, this enthusiasm will peter out over time. Employee advocacy leaders help to be sure that advocacy is an ongoing focus.
Employee advocacy case study: Oslo Metropolitan University
When Oslo Metropolitan University (generally known as OsloMet) wanted to extend engagement with its social content, the university grew an employee advocacy program.
The university used social listening to determine which subjects would most interest its audience. Then, they made content that spoke directly to these interests. The university built a content library to make it simple for employees to share on social. Here are some of their results:
- 15 shares by student and employee advocates had the same social reach as a post on the university’s Fb Page (which had 30,000 followers at the time)
- Advocacy posts had a 25% lower bounce rate than social adverts.
- The advocacy program led to a 2% rise in conversion rate on student recruitment content
- 30 advocates drove 40% of the traffic to the site for the university’s Girls and Technology Conference
Employee advocacy tools
Now that you know the value of an employee advocacy program, here are some tools that will help you put one in pace.
Amplify
The toughest part of employee advocacy is usually the execution. How do you actually get staff to share firm messaging on social media?
Hootsuite Amplify is a mobile employee advocacy tool. It makes it safe and simple for employees to share approved social content with their friends and followers.
Amplify also integrates with Workplace by Fb. This makes it simple for employees to share social content from a platform they already use daily.
Hootsuite Analytics
Hootsuite Analytics permits you to create custom reports that could help track the progress of your employee advocacy campaign. Getting real-time updates on campaign outcomes could help build employee excitement and encourage even more shares.
Plus, of course, analyzing your outcomes is a key part of proving the ROI of your employee advocacy campaigns. You will also get real data to help plan methods to enhance future outcomes.
Advocacy calculator
Unsure whether an employee advocacy campaign is true for your business? (Or perhaps you are convinced, however, you need some help getting your boss on board?)
We have made a calculator that estimates the number of new people you can reach by harnessing the power of your workforce.