How to Leverage Your Co-Workers to Exponentially Boost Your Social Media Reach
Why is it that your co-workers are Slacking memes and retweeting Ellen videos like crazy, but when you ask them to share your latest company blog on their LinkedIn you get crickets?
You see in the modern world of authenticity employees sharing company content can have a big impact. Let’s review some stats form Hootsuite’s research on employee advocacy, shall we?
- More people trust a regular employee (53%) than a CEO (47%)
- LinkedIn found the employees of a company tend to have 10 times more followers than the company itself.
- LinkedIn also found that while only about 2% of employees reshare their company’s social posts, they are responsible for 20% of the overall engagement.
- Job seekers (i.e., potential recruits) say current employees are the most trusted source of information about a company. They also rank social and professional networks as the most important resources in their job search.
If your thinking employee advocacy works the same as a pyramid scheme, you’d be right, but without the gimmicky weight loss stuff.
Looking at the numbers makes employee advocacy, not just attractive, but a necessity to grow your social media accounts. Now, when it comes to motivating employees to share and engage I’ve tried it all. There I needed to achieve employee advocacy:
1. Make Sharable Content
Shareable content is broad but you know it when you see it, and employees definitely know when they DON‘T see it. No one wants to share sales pitch after sales pitch to their LinkedIn audience. This is their career and professional reputation. Make the content that will engage an audience and start a conversation. Before you create your next blog, podcast, or whitepaper as yourself if it’s telling a story that someone will read and tell someone else about later that day.
Not all content is like that, but your top of the funnel content should be, easy to digest and share. Save the deep dive whitepapers your product for the Sales team to close a sale with.
2. Make It Easy
One of my failed attempts taught me this lesson. I used Zapier to create a zap that sent a Slack to the whole company. It had a link that you could click and a tab would open with a Twitter of a Facebook post (LinkedIn didn’t work with the Zap). All that my team had to do was click “Share” or “Retweet” or maybe just give me a “Like” at least. But I got zilch, nada, goose egg. Rarely did anyone share my content, and some people even muted my social media channel because I was posting too much (you ever get in trouble for doing your job TOO much?).
I wasn’t going to be deterred though. I was going to figure out what would spur my co-workers into action. Upon investigation, the Gen Xers of my office rarely look at Slack, they prefer email. The Millenials, well I would be fooling myself to believe they wanted to post about IRAs on their Twitter and they don’t even use Facebook!
Armed with this knowledge I went back to the drawing board and came up with a magnificent plan that won my executives a meeting with a new VC (while fundraising) and led to a 25% increase in traffic to the website from social channels.
Using CRM SaaS for Team Communication
I knew I needed an email that curated exactly what I wanted my co-workers to share on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. After researching SaaS (software as a service) options, none of them fit m needs just right. One was too expensive and meant for companies with 200+ employees. A lot of them just didn’t offer anything outside of an RSS feed.
Right before I resorted to courier pigeons to do my dirty work I remember that I can use Hubspot to tailor this kind of email to my needs. BINGO!
- Choose your content: First, I do batch work on these emails because it saves me time. I knock out at least a week’s worth of these emails (5 at a time). Then I look at my content calendar and pick the posts I think my co-workers would be most likely to share.
2. Create the CTA Buttons: Now is where Hubspot comes in. Their CTA creator allows you to make a button out of images so I use purple social media icons like so:
3. Create the “Shareable” Link: Then I copy the links I want my team and use Share Social Link Generator which creates a link that when clicked will open your link your sharing right into the opener’s social media account. It takes one more step out of your co-worker’s job! Once you paste the link your sharing into the generator, copy that link and paste it into your button.
4. Build and Schedule the Emails: Finally, I use Hubspot email tools to build and schedule the team email. I write out an example of what my co-workers can say when they post so they can publish a complete and informed post to their followers.
P.S.
Some of my co-workers had suggestions of what they wanted the team to share so I created a form using Hubspot for them to submit their important events or blog posts and I will add it to the email.
Does It Work? Show Me the Numbers
I have been running this experiment for approximately 6 weeks, so I do not have a lot of data, but so far the raw data is showing positive results.
Looking at the past 5 months of sessions on our website from social networks, there’s a clear uptick in October the week I started sending the team emails. I also noticed the sessions for October-November increased and stayed steady at the higher number, rather than dipping every other week or so like the traffic did July-September. The last data point is low but that’s because the week wasn’t over when I took the screenshot of analytics and I believe at the end of the full week the number will be higher.
As far as qualitative measurements go, my team is in a fundraising stage right now so when a Venture Capital contact saw one of my co-worker’s posts on LinkedIn he reached out and wanted to try to set up a meeting with our executives. Beyond that, my co-workers have been grateful and appreciative of my new system, and I am not going to lie, it’s a nice way to be transparent and show the team my hard work!
