6 Reasons Employee Advocates Aren’t Sharing Your Content (And How to Fix It)

When you’re establishing a social media presence, every like, share, or retweet is of the essence. But your own primary accounts – on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, for example – may not be able to do all of your heavy lifting. Interestingly, your biggest form of support comes from employee advocates.

When it comes to social media, each employee has their own network, which is made up of family and friends, but also former colleagues, customers or prospects, and generally speaking, like-minded professionals.

In other words, employee advocates are the perfect channel for humanizing your brand voice and making waves on social media.

Employee advocacy can pay big dividends, which is why it can be so frustrating when your employee advocates don’t deliver. Why aren’t your employee advocates sharing your content – and what can you do to fix it? Check out these tips:

1. It’s too time-consuming for employee advocates

Sharing a social media post means putting down your other work, logging into a platform, and then writing a little frame story around why your friends should click on an article.

At least that’s how your employee advocates feel!

A good employee advocacy program makes the sharing process as fast and as simple as possible. By launching a dedicated advocacy platform, allowing for effortless sharing of pre-approved content on the go, organizations can boost their employees’ participation in advocacy programs and broaden their brand reach.

2. Your employee advocates aren’t rewarded for their efforts

Marketers (or whoever is running the employee advocacy strategy) need to make sure that employees are engaged and enthusiastic about sharing content for their company.

But how do you achieve that?

Incentives can go a long way in terms of encouraging employees to share more content. Offering Amazon vouchers or organizing a nice team dinner is sure to be received with appreciation.

That said, rewards shouldn’t come at the expense of recognition. It’s extremely important to acknowledge employees for their efforts – especially if it’s in front of their peers.

Employee advocates who feel their efforts are truly appreciated across the company are much more likely to go the extra mile when representing your brand on social.

3. Content doesn’t align with the role & interests of employee advocates

Sharing social media posts can feel rather abstracted from your duties as an employee advocate.

If you’re in sales or marketing, you can understand how social media clicks and conversions help to grow revenue for your business. But if you’re in accounting, product, or HR, social media may feel like an unnecessary distraction – especially if what you’re sharing is all sales or marketing-oriented.

That’s why segmenting your employees and writing content specific to their audiences is a great way around this.

Ensono, a global hybrid IT solution company, does just that! With over 20 content types, covering 40 different topics, Ensono’s marketing team uses special tags to segment all of their content by topics. This functionality allows employee advocates to fully customize their pool of content by selecting relevant topics and networks – and share the articles that resonate most with them!

4. Employee advocates have lost momentum

Every employee advocacy program is entirely voluntary. Although marketers aim for 100% participation, there will almost always be an uneven distribution – employees who share often and (the social enthusiasts), employees who share irregularly (the social majority), and employees who never share (the social curmudgeons).

Empowering the social curmudgeons (the outliers) can be tricky, so your best bet is to focus on the social majority – individuals who lose momentum over time, mainly because they don’t see a clear value.

So what’s a quick win?

It can be simple as recognizing employee advocates for their hard effort. Sisense, a BI software company, decided to run a monthly email digest, which celebrates its top employee advocates. The emails uncover the number of clicks and conversions generated by advocates.

Led by Sisense’s social media manager, this initiative not only helped drive wide participation among the social majority, it also made them aware that they’re part of a mission; that sharing content via social media isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a results-driven activity.

As such, they were able to see how their own sharing efforts yields great social amplification and increased engagement, and in turn positive ROI.

If you still need improvement, try interviewing infrequent advocates and see what would make their lives easier!

5. Employee advocates lack proper social media training

Most employees are accustomed to social media from their day-to-day, but for some, it can be a daunting territory. Whether you’re onboarding newbies or pros, each employee advocate deserves proper social media training.

To get started, you need to make sure that employees understand the nuts and bolts of B2B social media marketing – how each social network works, which content works best, and how to take advantage of these platforms to drive the company’s goals.

Employees should also be informed of the marketing team’s social media KPIs as well as their social media policy. Make sure employees are also following your company pages.

At this stage of the training, you should also offer members some employee advocacy best practices to not only guide their content sharing but also build up their personal profiles. Everything from updating their LinkedIn experience section to connecting and following users, and tweaking their posts, should be covered!

In the final stage, employee advocates should also get some hands-on sessions, walking through the employee advocacy platform – how to log in, connect profiles, share and edit content, and so on.

For a more detailed employee advocacy training guide, read: Launching an Employee Advocacy Program: How to Train Employees in Less Than 2 Weeks!

6. Employee advocates’ voices aren’t being heard

One thing that can really discourage employee advocates is being told that you have to share this content and that’s the only way to do it. In other words, your marketing team is utilizing social advocacy as another channel to echo their corporate messaging.

This kind of top-down approach is almost certain to quash enthusiasm for your social advocacy program. Not to mention, it’s going to drive fewer people to engage with content shared by employees.

Schedule regular meetings and feedback sessions where employee input can be used to tailor relevant content, build a better rewards system, and improve the overall experience of the advocacy program.

Keeping an open-door policy will ensure that your employees remain confident and enthusiastic about sharing content that benefits them and the company.

Get employee advocates excited about content sharing!

Once again, the best way to ensure employee advocates actively share content is by making it as easy as possible for them.

And the best way to make it easy for them is to offer an employee advocacy tool that creates an effortless, intuitive, and rewarding sharing experience.

With Oktopost’s employee advocacy app, available for mobile and desktop, B2B marketers can push hyper-relevant content directly to employees, allowing them to filter, customize, and share it with a push of a button.

Enterprise teams that use Oktopost generate as much as a 70% increase in organic social reach and help to position employees as thought leaders – making it a real win-win for both marketers and employees.

Want to make employee advocacy simple, quick, and fun for employee advocates? Request a demo today!