Dear Business Leader:
Please, please stop talking about "Increased Brand Awareness" as though it's something you can pick off the shelf at any corner shop. I know you believe passionately in the power of employee advocacy, but the benefits don't appear as if by magic - you have to work for them.
I've said it before: "Advocacy is an outcome, not an objective." You should know that by now, and it doesn't just apply to your people - you need to be clear about every aspect of your program and get all the pieces in place.
Yes, I know you have a great champion, enthusiastic employees, high-quality content and a fully featured advocacy platform to hang it all on, but ...
But what? I'll tell you if you let me finish.
... but you're not getting the engagement you need to raise the profile of your brand among your employees' social connections. And before you ask, your people are having a ball sharing the content your admins have curated for them - the problem lies elsewhere.
Engagement Relies on More Than Just Sharing
Tell me something - how many of your people were active on social media before you introduced this initiative?
How should you know? Because you had your champion kick off the project by doing a survey across your entire organization, that's how. Since you're struggling to remember that far back, let me remind you - while more than half your people have personal social-media accounts, only around one-in-five has any experience of using social media in business.
You're right, that's why you ran training sessions for anyone who wanted to kick-start the process - which is why you have such a healthy number of people active on your advocacy platform. But you need to look at the stats; although their combined reach is good, the level of engagement is down on where it should be.
Yes, it puzzled me too. But I've been taking a look at what people are sharing and I spotted a few things that could be causing it. Although your content is great and your people are happy to share it, there's little or no variety in the message that their connections receive.
And that's because ...
You Need to Help Your People Give Their Posts Context
When you post an update on LinkedIn, do you just hurl a link at your connections and hope that people will click it? Or do you write a short introduction that explains the context of the piece and why you shared it?
And on Twitter, do you make some attempt to identify each tweet as being relevant to a particular discussion? Or do you just broadcast random content in the hope that someone, somewhere will find it interesting?
What do you mean, you don't have much time for that stuff right now? We need to talk about this ... but it can wait. Let me tell you what's missing from your employees' updates and posts - context. And you can do something about that.
I'm sure you know that social-media updates typically acquire context either by being part of a discussion on a specific topic, or by appealing to a particular group of people.
You did? Astounding! So what are your people missing?
Let me answer that. Each network has its own set of identifiers, or labels, but I'll use Twitter as an example:
Users align tweets with specific discussions by including relevant hashtags in their messages; similarly, mentions identify individuals likely to have an interest in those tweets - it's simply Twitter's way of steering a conversation in a particular direction. Other networks, including LinkedIn and Google+ and have equivalent functionality, although LinkedIn users aren't too sold on hashtags.
What I found is that most of your people aren't using identifiers - no hashtags, no mentions, and therefore no context. I also found out why.
Curation Isn't Just About Links
When your admins set up an item of content for sharing, they have the option to insert a pre-formatted comment for each network, which saves time for users. You and your team decided to leave people maximum flexibility in personalizing their messages - which is great - so the admins leave the "standard" comment fields empty.
But ... and it's a big one ...
... most of your people aren't adding identifiers to their posts, which explains the lack of engagement with their audiences. When I chatted with a few people, it seems they're just not sure what labels to use and how best to use them. Simple as that - your social-media training only covered the topic in outline and most users were more concerned with learning the basics so they didn't take a deeper look.
So the good news is that there's a simple fix, once you work out what you want to use. Seems to me you should involve your admins in the discussion - maybe you can come up with a list of preferred hashtags for the various categories of content? Then they can insert one or two when they're uploading, which would save your people having to guess which to use.
What? Yes, that will start to generate the increased brand awareness you so desperately want - provided you do your homework. Sounds like you should be taking the social-media training yourself if you plan to make more time for it in future ...
Yes, I know - you don't want to deprive others of the opportunity. Well, at least you're headed in the right direction, which is a big improvement on the way you started out.
You what? "Context" is your new word of the week? I should be grateful?
Beyond Engagement is an exclusive Social Media Today column published every other Thursday.
Image credits:
Column logo by Marie Otsuka
context / shutterstock