#005 How Do I Get My Employees To Engage With Us On Social Media?

Employee Advocacy is what most businesses should be thinking about when they talk about influencer marketing and how amazing it is. If you don’t have a quality social community built out or you’re still trying to figure out your brand’s purpose, start with your employees! We’re sharing how to launch an advocacy program, gamification, tracking, getting buy-in and ROI.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Your employees should be your biggest advocates. Give them the power to amplify your message!
The Numbers: Nearly 31% of high growth firms have a formal employee advocacy program more than double than the, than the average of all other firms.
Gone are the days are the people in the breakroom. People want to see their photos on your social channels.
Get your tribe together and have them all connect with your brand’s digital.
Have your employees turn on the “See First” notifications on the page.
Create a gamified program that incentivizes your team to engage with the content and post authentic posts on-the-job!
ROI comes in the form of great employee engagement, the ability to create content at scale for a lot less expense and work. Plus, you get the MOST authentic story out of these photos and engagements.
Make sure the incentive is totally worth the effort! We tried a significant value gift card and it definitely worked. BUT, people will do a lot for a t-shirt. Another business used teams to create video content.
Tracking: The most basic way is counting it up but there are also social tools like Sprout Social where you can track content and performance. There’s also anecdotal evidence like “are our team members like our content? yup!”
Who should own the program? The owners have to be involved at least with their buy-in. But the best advice we can give you is to NOT have your social media programs be given to someone who hates social. Don’t laugh, it happens.

Want your question to be answered on the generation social media podcast? Tell us what it is here!

Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

You don't have to be a millennial to be socially savvy. We believe anyone can join generation social media. And your journey starts now. This is the generation social media podcast by Chatterkick. Today we're answering a question submitted by one of our fans, friends or family members, a fan. But not my mom, but not Beth's mom. That'll be the next episode. So the question that we're going to talk about today is how do I get my employees to engage with us on social media? So Beth, you've been talking a lot about employee advocacy. Tell us a little bit about what that means to a business and then jump into how to get employees engaged. So I think employee advocacy is really what most businesses should be thinking about in terms of influencer marketing. You know, everybody talks about influencer marketing and how amazing and how much of a solution it is.

And I think it's an awesome opportunity for a lot of brands. But if you are in a space where you're not even quite there yet, for example, maybe you don't have a good social community built up or maybe you're just still trying to figure out your brand's purpose or attraction level. And the first step with that, especially if you're a B2B or you're not in a space where influencer marketing is really prevalent start with your employees, they should be your biggest advocates. And it's kind of amazing thing that happens when you give the power to your employees instead of trying to, you know, damper their social media efforts is if they really believe in what you are doing, which let's hope. So if they're working at your company they can be the best advocates for your business and really take the message that you're trying to send and amplify it times a hundred.

It's amazing what happens when you give that opportunity to those people that are in your business every day. And let's be honest, your customers are interacting with your employees probably just as much as they're interacting with you. Totally. So I have some statistics and numbers for you. I think these are really, some of these are quite astounding. So Hinge Research Institute did a survey of 588 different participants. And so they ask questions about employee advocacy, what the results are, who's using them, who's not. So this was some of the findings. So businesses with employee advocacy grow faster and see more benefits than those without them, nearly 31% of high growth firms have a formal employee advocacy program more than double than the, than the average of all other firms. Super interesting. Yeah. And you know, I think when we first started the conversation with social media, with businesses and brands, I remember businesses telling us like, well, the only people on my Facebook page are my employees anyways.

Or it's just the people who work here. And I think that's funny. Now after, you know, six, seven years of doing this, those conversations are definitely changing to, oh, maybe that's what this is really for. And maybe that's the strategy that makes the most sense and is probably the most approachable for a lot of businesses. You know, marketing, selling, building funnels, building communities, building just the tribe around brands is that's hard and it's way easier just to say let's use these platforms and get our employees excited, connected and what's better than just putting them on a pedestal and showcasing and giving them some attention. You know, gone are the days of the picture and the break room, people want their picture across the social channels to show that they have recognition and that they've made accomplishments and their career. I love that you brought up kind of the funnels and the sales part of this cause this is really both employee engagement recognition, but it also is a brand play.

One of the other statistics from the study was that 64% of the advocates in the formal program credited the employee advocacy to attracting and developing new business and nearly 45% attribute revenue, new revenue streams to employee advocacy. You also kind of talked about just employee engagement overall, almost 86% of advocates in a formal program said their involvement in social media had a positive impact on their career. Yeah, I think that's something that's so it's obvious if you really think about it, right? You, you give your opportunity, give your employees that opportunity to showcase who you are and to get out there and really to build networks and relationships, guess what that works. It's sales, it's those relationships, development develop on social channels and it's a pretty proven method. And so it, it works really well and I think that brands and businesses really need to take note of that and stop worrying about it isn't going to work and just start trying it.

I was kind of thinking about this as we were getting ready to do the podcast today. This was Oh 2013 and 2014. It wasn't a formal advocacy program, but we're helping launch a new brand in New York. And part of getting that, that's a really noisy space for social, but part of launching that brand, we created this email that we sent out every week to the employees and the team members to go and like specific posts and say certain things on the platform. And while the goal of that was more of a brand play, it really got the team member more engaged in what we were doing on social. And so we instantly had more likes and shares than we would've had if we would have just kind of been operating on our own posting all this social media engagement. So that was a really long time ago.

But tell me a little bit more about an advocacy program that we're trying or we're helping organizations with. What does it look like? So I think there's a couple of different options. The first, let's start with the most simple like the obvious and easiest for businesses, which is just connect your employees with your social accounts, make sure they have the right names, the right handle. And when I say do it, just have everybody do it together in a team meeting. Yeah, we were working with one business and they wanted to grow their audience on Facebook. And so they just at one of their team meetings, just all pulled up their phone and ask their friends, businesses and connections that they had on their personal account to like their business page and they got like a hundred fans and 10 minutes. And I think you can do the exact same thing with your employees.

And a lot of times it's not the fact that your employees don't want to, it's either they liked it a long time ago, so they have interacted with you recently. So tell them to like share, comment. Get some activity on those posts that'll help it reappear in their news feed. And then you can also have them mark the see first option so that they can see your pages content higher than maybe getting lost in the newsfeed. And those are just really basic. And starting with Facebook. If that's your primary social platform LinkedIn, make sure you're connected with your employees on LinkedIn just as a basic as a person and you can share each other's content. Have your blog posts or you know, I don't know if businesses are still doing internal newsletters, I think there is still a lot of them, but those should be living online so that your employees can share what's happening in your organization.

What are you doing? The first step is just connect. Yeah, I love that. I think the amount of effort that goes into creating content for a newsletter, that's like 50 different social media posts and people want to be recognized, they want to feel good and the best way to create a community right now is on social. Tell me a little bit about gamification. You kinda went through a pretty basic strategy on employee advocacy. Right now we're working on kind of a gamification model for one of our clients. Tell me a little bit more about how that works. Well, I think the thing that you have to think about with these employee advocacy programs is you have to be consistent and you have to mix it up otherwise, and you have to kind of make it fun. I mean, nobody wants to be forced to do anything.

Right. And so one of the ideas that we had, and we've taken this model to a couple of different businesses is let's make it a challenge, make it a game. And so it was kind of an opportunity for this business. They have a lot of male men that worked there for anywhere from 22 to probably you know, on up. And they, you know, the, that demographic, if you look at 22 to let's say 65 they're on a lot of different platforms and they're using the platforms very differently. And this business didn't have all the platforms necessarily as business accounts. So what we did was we helped and we did one one-to-one. We went through and we asked the employees, do you understand how this works? And do you do you want to participate? It was not mandatory.

It's supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be exciting. And then a full kickoff, it was really, it was off site. So it was at a bar. Everybody was really kind of Heather guards down a little bit. We really laid the blueprint for what the opportunity was. And like you said before, not forcing people to join because if you do that will backfire. And really kind of telling them how to get involved and then ultimately how this benefits both of them and the business. Yep. And, and one thing we learned about that, especially because this podcast is about like breaking social stereotypes in some regards is most of the people we're connected on Facebook. And we thought especially cause they had such a young employee base that a lot of those would be gravitating on Instagram. And they did have a mix, but it was interesting to see that they still had a lot of the young men in their organization.

Facebook was their platform of choice and the one that they were the most comfortable with. And so then what we did is we basically said, okay, we're going to set up a point system and we're going to track it. Every time you interact with the brand and the business, you get a point every time you create new content on behalf of the business that shows our purpose, our mission a day in the life. We kind of gave them guard rails to say, you know, make sure that there's no customer information in the background. Like don't look like you're goofing off. Like that's not what we're trying to get across here. But really help them be part of the larger picture. And then they got like five points if they did that. And this is where you start to see real ROI because not only are you getting great employee engagement, but if you can create content at scale, videos, photos day in the life they're on job sites all over the region, you're now saving drastic amounts of dollars because every piece of content, even though it may just be a photo to have someone else do that, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of expense and it's a lot of coordination and you know, every time you take that one photo and move it across four people desk, that adds cost to your business.

And so it's been a really great opportunity and I don't know if it'll be an ongoing thing for the rest of time, but at least it gets those businesses those employees really excited and they understand it and it's something that you could turn on when you want and you can, you know, take a break from it when you want. I think there's such a powerful brand move. We're trying to help businesses all the time tell their most authentic story online. There's nothing more authentic than creating. And capturing content while you're working where you're working at and I think the best benefits of this from a brand perspective is really engaging employees on the job and capturing that live in the moment content that then they're posting and being an advocate on your behalf, but you can also use on your brand page and that I think is the most powerful way to tell your story is through their and their perspective.

But also anytime when we see this all the time on all of the brands that we manage, anytime you post a picture of somebody's face, right? Or You guys always work. Yeah. Faces, smiling boomerangs, all of that. Any of our posts with our employees and them versus you know, any of our blog posts or anything like that. They are always the ones that are the top performers. People want to see their friends, they want to see themselves, they want to see their, their own recognition on those pages, but then their families get involved. Right. Every time we post a picture of you, our page just goes crazy. Post a picture of hi, just have a lot of family. Somebody who's just had a baby. When we post a picture of their family and the baby, I mean people just really want to see the people behind the business and that's what a brand is.

And that's the difference between posting your logo and posting the people. Right. And I think, you know, from a leader perspective and really, you know, as an owner of of this company, we do a lot of this ourselves. And although we don't have a formal like game like we are talking about, I think it's so exciting to me to be able to showcase my employees because I built this business not just because I wanted to do something, I built this to be the collective of all of our efforts. And so it's a really great thing to see your employees get recognition and excitement and honestly really like what they do. That's what you're trying to do every day. So our people are definitely the DNA in it. When you scroll through any of our platforms, you see them everywhere. Some more than most because like our business, like most businesses, not everybody loves being on camera, but we try to get everybody engaged as much as possible.

So you kind of talked about the, the program a little bit. What did they use as a reward? Like how do they really get people in to this game? What was the, what was the buy in? So there wasn't incentive? It was a significant dollar value. I think you need to have something that's, you know, more than like a $10 gift or a hat or something. Although people will do a lot for our tee shirts. Do not exclude that. But I think that we ran it for, you know, a select period of time, so it wasn't forever. I was talking to another business that did something similar and she said it worked really well. They had different teams. So three different teams created a piece of content. It was actually a video that they posted on their Instagram account and she said it worked amazing.

They were really excited with it. I think they did a prize at the end, but the problem they had is that it just ended out they didn't have any plan to do what to do with it next. And I think that's what you really need to think about when you're launching an effort. Like this is who's going to own this program. What, and it doesn't have to be something that is never ending, but it does need to have some defined goals, outcomes, timeframes, because otherwise it'll just be another project. That's great. Yay. Everything worked. And then like, guess what? Your Facebook page doesn't stop. So your Facebook page is always there and then all of a sudden everybody kind of fizzles out. Who Do you think should own an employee advocacy program? Like who really should be involved in your opinion? Well, I think the ownership or the owner or the leadership needs to have a direct hand.

They may not need to be the owners of it, but whoever is in charge, yes, they need buy-in and they really should be handling a lot of the culture and employee engagement. Like that's a pretty standard role of leadership. So they need to have some sort of connection. They need to believe that this is going to work and help. I think the worst place for social media or any court sort of sort of a plan in social to belong is with somebody that hates it. Like personally hate social professionally does not believe in it. And there's still a lot of people out there. I hear that all the time. Like, oh, I hate Facebook. It's so annoying. I'm like, well don't do it and don't be in charge of it for your business. So because it's never gonna work if you despise it. I never really thought of that.

But that is like probably the most true is basic tip that you should follow on whoever owns any of your social assets. You talked a little bit about tracking, so there are a couple of different ways to track. I know there are tools like Bonusly, Tap My Back, You Earned It. Those are some of those tools. Cool software platforms out there. Really cool ways to navigate kind of the gamification. It makes it really fun if you have people who are willing to engage in some sort of tech way. Cause these are all apps and websites and some, if you haven't, I don't know, people in your business who aren't like, just don't want to get on email or they're still a fan of doing paperwork. Maybe not these apps. But what are some other ways without getting these specific bonus apps that you can track an employee advocacy program?

I mean the most basic way, and this is kind of a pain, it's just counting. Like if you don't have id, it's free. If you don't have a lot of employees at your organization I would start just looking. And if you don't want to have hard metrics, then you don't have to put in the hard work. So you can just start with, hey, looking at your posts, your employees look like they're engaging. Are you seeing that people that like and share your comments or your posts? Do they, is that your people that work there? Like that's a great anecdotal instance. But if you really want to see metrics than just literally count and see how many people, how many of your 10 people that liked the post, what's the ratio of your employees. And you can do that on a micro level per post or you can do it on a macro level per month, per year.

There's lots of software that can help you with that. We use our social media management software a lot that every time we're responding to messages or comments or putting posts out, we look to see is there employees that are engaging at that business. And this is a really good tracking mechanism because it kind of does the counting and tracking for you in results and results for you. And it can, can spit out a report at the end of the month to see how many employees, or at least when we're doing it on behalf of the business, we don't always know every single person that works there, but there's some times language in their comments like our or we that you can kind of make those assumptions. And if you have a thousand to 5,000 people in your company, you could do the same thing without knowing every single person.

I think the employee advocacy programs are just super interesting for a lot of reasons that we've been talking about with team engagement or social media engagement in content. But let's talk a little bit about why people are afraid of doing them. I mean, people are afraid of their employees talking crap about them online. These advocacy programs can really change the discussion and the topics. Yeah, I think first of all, you need to take a hard look at your business and your culture. If you have a culture that is maybe not in a great place right now or you have negative reviews on Glassdoor indeed, and you're just really struggling from a culture perspective. You may not want to just hand someone a microphone tomorrow, right? You need to start shifting the dialogue in general. You need to get buy-in. You need to get your employees ready to fight for you and Rally for you.

And that could take a couple of weeks. That could take a year. And so you really need to kind of give yourself a hard look in the mirror and say, where are we at right now? And then from there, decide how you can scale that. If you have a pretty great, most businesses have, I would say at least a mediocre to a pretty good work environment. And if you're at that point, then that's a good time to think about, okay, how can we use this for retention? How can we use this for recognition? And just start slow, just like we said, start simple, connect with people. A Facebook group is a really great tool to use. Just put all your employees in a Facebook group. It kind of gives you that quieter environment and a little bit more intimate that you can have those conversations, see how it goes, and then expand it out a little bit. The one thing I think businesses forget about is just because you don't have a formal program doesn't mean people aren't talking about their workplace. So right now it's already happening. This just allows you to kind of put your arms around it a little bit and say, okay, we're going to now try to take a little bit of authority and authenticity to it and amplify the positive. I mean, again, like it's just that authentic story.

Social Media, inspirationChatterkickSeptember 18, 2019employee advocacy, social media best practice