The question I get asked most? “How do I get employees on board to share on behalf of the company? Why would they do it?”
Here are 3 simple things you should do:
1. Make it about them
Your team will get involved when you understand it’s not about you, it’s about them.
Many of the outcomes of a successful employee advocacy programme such as increased brand awareness are great… for the brand.
But they aren’t necessarily key motivators for employees.
When you introduce the idea of employee advocacy – of becoming ambassadors for the company – you need to go into sales mode. You need to sell your team the benefits of doing this.
These could include:
- Learning valuable new skills for their career such as writing, social media
- Build a better understanding and confidence in their own purpose
- Becoming an active part of community of peers
- Understanding their role, the business and customers better
- Build strong relationship with customers
Don’t try to motivate people by offering:
- Cash or other physical rewards
- Gamification
The reason the last two things shouldn’t be your main focus is this: if people only sign up to your programme for a reward, they won’t last long.
2. Make it easy
When you’re encouraging a new behaviour or habit one of the core factors in making it happen and keep happening is how easy it is.
So you need to understand the barriers your team have to sharing on social media. Common ones are:
- I don’t have the time
- I get imposter syndrome
- I’m not a writer
- I share but no one engages with my post
- I don’t know what to write about
- I’m worried about people saying unkind things.
To help them grow their profile, you need to help them share consistently over a longer period of time. You need to help them overcome their barriers and get past the initial period where they won’t necessarily get much engagement. They need to keep going to succeed.
You can help them with a system which makes daily sharing easy:
- Clarity on what they’re talking about
- A clear system for generating ideas
- Templates for articles and posts
- Clarity on who their talking to
- A system to quickly capture ideas/research
- Clear daily actions which fit with their learning stage.
3. Make it a shared experience
One of the things which can transform how people grow is making the new behaviour part of a shared experience. It’s important they don’t feel they’re going through this alone. That they can reach out and get support from others in the same situation
Help them by:
- Enabling them to be part of a community of learners
- Encourage peer-to-peer support
- Show that they’re not sharing into ‘black hole’
- Enable them to easily follow and learn from what others are doing