The document discusses how to implement an effective employee social media advocacy program. It recommends identifying key employee audiences, building a business case to get executive buy-in, picking a social media management platform, developing content and training materials, launching the program, and nurturing ongoing employee participation through incentives and best practices. The goal is to empower employees as social media advocates and increase the reach, engagement, and impact of organizational social media efforts.
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Let's Get Social: How to Turn Employees into Social Media Rock Stars
1. Let’s Get Social!
Andreea Cojocariu
@ANDREEAC_T
Chief Digital Marketing Officer
#SocialJoy | #DSATL
Turning Employees into Social Media Rock Stars with an
Employee Social Media Advocacy Program
2. SOCIAL MEDIA EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY
BY THE NUMBERS
561%INCREASED REACH
76%PEOPLE BUY
FROM PEOPLE
78%OUTSELL
PEERS
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
7. Social Supports all Sales
and Marketing
Email Support
White Papers Blog posts
Landing Pages
(Ads/Emails)
Event Support
PR Support SEO Support
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
8. LAUNCHING AN EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY PROGRAM
• Build a business case and get
executive buy-in
• Identify users/seats
• Pick a vendor
• Build social content
• Build training materials
• Launch
• Nurture
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
9. Build a business case and get executive buy-in
Data and Stats--Existing
Employee Audience + Industry
data
• 55% of buyers (B2B)
research on social
• 75% of B2B buyers use
social media to make
purchasing decisions.
• 84% of C-level &VPs use
social when making
purchasing decisions.
Executives active on social
• 78% increase in positive
impact on org’s reputation
• 76% increase in org’s
innovation
• 64% helps attract new
customers
• 64% drives a competitive
edge
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
11. Pick a Vendor
• KPI’s
• Scheduling functionality
• Usability
• Mobile App availability
• Twitter API work-arounds
• Product enhancement
frequency
Considerations
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
12. KPI and Integration checklist
What do you want to measure?
• Engagement
• Top users
• Top content
• Referral traffic
• ABM data
• Google Analytics (or your
analytics tool)
• Social CRM
• Marketo/Pardot
• Salesforce
• ABM tool integration
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
17. “If I have a thousand ideas and
only one turns out to be good I am
satisfied.” —Alfred Nobel
17
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
18. LAUNCHING AN EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY PROGRAM
• Build a business case and get
executive buy-in
• Identify users/seats
• Pick a vendor
• Build social content
• Build training materials
• Launch
• Nurture
#SOCIALJOY | #DSATL | @ANDREEAC_T
19. The future is already
here. It’s just not
evenly distributed.
21. Prelaunch Checklist
Announce platform internally
Best practices for engaging natively
on social and account creation
Training materials
Schedule launch trainings
Have your user list
Upload social media content
**4 weeks to 1 week prior to launch**
22. Launch Day Checklist
Upload users into the platform
Announce launch in the AM
Hold (multiple) live trainings
Share supporting training material
with users (intranet)
23. Post Launch
Continued training
Best practice tips (intranet blogs,
emails)
Social coaching sessions
Groups and 1 on 1 for executives
Incentivize users
Continue adding social content
Quality content
Work with your overall social,
content, and marketing
strategies
24. Program Incentives
Reward top users!
﹩ Cash prizes
﹩ Swag
﹩ Public acknowledgement
Frequency
﹩Monthly
﹩Quarterly
**Reset leaderboards**
Top Users
• Leaderboard (top
participants)
• Top users driving the
most engagement
• Top users driving the
most traffic to owned
collateral
25. So little time…so much information!
Have questions
Want this deck
Resources
Dsatl.19@cojoymarketing.com
https://www.cojoymarketing.com/
dsatl19/
Notas do Editor
LET’S GET SOCIAL, SHALL WE?
WELCOME TO TURNING YOUR EMPLOYEES INTO SOCIAL MEDIA ROCK STARS WITH AN EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY PROGRAM. I’M ANDREEA COJOCARIU AND IT IS MY ABSOLUTE PLEASURE TO SHARE MY BRAIN WITH YOU THIS MORNING.
DURING THIS SESSIION, FEEL FREE TO LIVE TWEET USING #SOCIALJOY AND #DSATL.
AT THE END OF THE DAY, WE SHOULD BE DATA DRIVEN MARKETERS.
AND THE DATA AVAILABLE TO US NOW INDICATES THAT…
Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels. In other words, you can share a post via your corporate channels, but if your employees share that message or one similar, your reach increases 561%. Think about that for a moment.
76% is the number of people who would rather do business with a person instead of a brand. That’s a dangerous statement to make in marketing, but the reality is that while we use social for brand awareness, our employees are out there building relationships and trust that will earn us that business. So we need to empower them instead of the letting them go rogue. I start to have heart palpitations when I see employees posting content not approved because sometimes, it’s taken out of context and misinterpreted.
78%. Employees using social outsell their peers and competitors by 78%. That’s not a number to scoff at. Social selling works. This isn’t about social selling per say, but the type of program I’m going to to teach you to launch has a big social selling component.
At the end of every month, when you’re pulling reporting, do you know WHO is engaging with your corporate social content? Are you attracting and growing your audience with prospects or are your employees super active and engaging?
You want both, but are you measuring both. Remember, at the end of the day, it’s about the numbers.
So I’m going to give you some homework. Because launching a program like this is an investment with resources and budget, you really need to make sure it’s worth it for you. I want you to go back to your Social CRM and create audience lists. You can do this with Digimind . And if you’re not using these vendors, grab me after this session and we can brainstorm how you can do it…but you need to identify your audience so you know who’s engaging with you. It’s going to be a manual process because vendors unfortunately haven’t gotten to the point where you you do this easily, but it’s worth knowing if you’re employees are engaging more than other audience segments.
That’s why it’s important to split employee engagement into it’s own channel.
Here’s an example of an org’s strategy matrix. Employee Social is part of your overall social strategy and feeds from your corporate strategy.
Social is part of your integrated marketing strategy.
I don’t believe in siloed channels. One of the first questions I ask an organization is how well do your marketing channels communicate with each other and with sales. We all need to tell a similar story to our prospects because….
The first step is getting executive buy-in. Easier said than done, I’m aware. And it will take time and lots and lots of meetings. But…it can be done. I’m more than happy to be a resource for you after this session.
Start with then numbers at the beginning of this presentation and add in a few more. Start with the homework assignment of identifying which of your employees are already active. Are any of your senior executives or C-levels active on social already? Are they sharing your content?
Before I get into the data on executives, how many of you have executives already active on social or who want to be active on social?
Weber Shandwick ran a study or rather an audit of top C-levels and found….
78% increase in positive impact on org’s reputation
76% increase in org’s innovation
64% helps attract new customers
64% drives a competitive edge
When you’re back at your office and you’re identifying employees who are already active on social, you may want to break them into these groups. Having a list will help you determine how many seats you really needs so you can budget accordingly.
Prioritize with Executives and sales first. Then bring in marketing and HR and anyone customer facing that wants to be part of this. What I found was that employees who are proud to work for your org want to content to share on their social. It helps them along their career path and it helps you spread brand awareness. These are your influencers! And you’re already paying them!
So you’ve identified users and you have that number. Now it’s time to start researching vendors. When you’re talking to vendors, you want to make sure you hit on these bullets.
Do they capture core KPI’s you need?
How easy is it to schedule? Is it a manual or is there AI working in the background that lets schedules post for you based on engagement data.
Is there a mobile app? From my experience, most of my users were on the mobile app more than the desktop version.
How easy is it to really use? Can someone get log-in credentials and still hit the ground running so to speak and figure it out?
Twitter. Let’s talk about them for a second because they don’t make life easy for third party vendors. I think it was early last year that they put some heavy restrictions in an effort to reduce bots and improve quality. So before, you were able to provide social copy and users could share directly. You can’t really do that anymore and employee advocacy managers have had to find work arounds.
Lastly, you want to know how often product enhancements are made, if you have any voice in those, and how are they communicated.
You could go with any vendor, but understand that what they measure and their integrations will differ. I was always on the hunt for specific KPIs so I asked very granular questions.
With engagement, I wanted to get as much data as possible. You’re never going to know who engaged, but you want to make sure the platform captures things like clicks, replies, re-shares, etc.
You’ll want to know top users and you may even want to be able to segment users by department.
You’ll want to know top content so you can continue adding content that performs well.
Referral traffic. This one is a little harder. I was wanting to know several things with this. Which user was driving traffic to owned collateral and which piece of collateral was actually getting viewed. This goes hand-in-hand with having a Google Analytics integration. Chances are that most providers won’t be able to provide this.
ABM Data is another one. You may get lucky and find an vendor that integrates. Chances are you won’t get name data, but you may get company level data. I know for sure one vendor provides this. Use this data to work through an integrated ABM strategy.
Other integrations that are helpful are marketing automation and salesforce. This is extremely helpful especially if there is a specific CTA on landing pages that you’re tracking.
Be careful with salesforce integrations. A lot of vendors will allow users to access the program through salesforce. Make sure you understand what that user experience looks like. I’ve found that at least with one vendor, the experience is rather lacking. If it’s pulling into SalesForce, then amazing. But someone on your end will need to do the mapping or it will cost you.
You want to make posting as easy as possible. Depending on the vendor, you’ll have at least two options: Share now and Schedule Post. The issue comes with scheduling because that’s an additional step that for most of users, will be too of an effort.
You can provide users with best times to schedule posts. You can use data from your corporate social efforts to start and then as the program progresses, provide best practice times you’ll get from reporting each month. I’ve done that and while some adopt to it, I noticed that most it was too much effort and adoption decreased. I saw more users share now when new posts were available and it cluttered their social feeds.
What works best is auto-schedule. Users select and have the option to edit posts and then use the scheduling feature so there is no need to manually input a date and time. Just like it’s easier to manage corporate social to use the power of AI to determine best times based on engagement, a vendor platform that does the same thing is ideal. Once you train users on how to select messages and use the auto-schedule function, you’ll notice that adoption increases and of course the trickle down effect of increased engagement, website traffic, leads, etc. When you’re assessing vendors, make sure to get a demo of not only the desktop auto-scheduling function, but also the mobile since most of your users will most likely use their smart devices
I will tell you that auto-scheduling is a deal breaker when I’m looking at vendors because it can kill the user experience if you don’t have that feature.
So first, I can’t find the genius who said this, but it’s true. You want a vendor with a tool that takes very little instruction. The reason being is that as you know, once you give a training, people tend to forget things. You need the initial use to be so easy to use, your employees can start using it right away.
You’ll still need to train and teach how to make the most of the tool, but once a user gets invited to the platform..things like registration and sharing initially should be self explanatory.
Twitter until last year, has made it more difficult for third parties to share messages. Before, you could provide the tweet copy and image and all users needed to do was share. Since then you can only technically provide the link.
The problem is that while we want users to learn how to write their own social posts, they won’t. You need to do it for them. And to be honest, it keeps everything on brand.
One of my main criteria points was how to work around Twitter’s requirements. Gaggle AMP won’t tell you to use the platform the way I’m telling you to use it, but I figured out that work around. You can provide suggested copy and all the users need to do is copy and paste.
Not all vendors make it so simple. With one vendor, users could copy and paste Linkedin copy and then edit for Twitter to tag Twitter accounts (which no one hardly did). It looked awful. But with what you see, it’s just copy and paste. Fairly simple and easy. Adoption was easy. Users don’t complain.
This to me, is one of those deal breakers because even though engagement isn’t high on Twitter..Google’s relationship with Twitter makes it worth the effort since tweets can be indexed and that impacts search results. Again, with the integrated marketing idea. Search and social play nicely together and this is an example.
You wan to make sure that the mobile is seamless and easy because your users will more than likely use the mobile app instead of the desktop version. Make sure to test the scheduling function, especially Twitter (copy and pasting). You’ll want to make sure the share now option is easy and changing settings is fairly simple.
If your vendor has a thousand ideas and one of them turns out to be a good one, then how do they handle product enhancements? More importantly, how do they handle product recommendations. For me, this is important because this space does change fairly frequently. You want a vendor partner, not just a vendor.
So we’ve gone through how to build a business case, identify users, picking a vendor and identifying KPIs. At this point, you’ve picked the best vendor and signed contracts and you’re preparing to launch. Before you invite all your users to the program and begin training, you need to make sure you have content populated in the platform first.
You’re going to need evergreen content. Take existing ever green content that you know performed well on corporate social and social posts to your employee social media advocacy program. You’re going to want 50-100 posts depending on your bandwidth loaded in the platform already. Typically, this can take anywhere from 2-4 weeks. Plan accordingly.
About a month prior to launch, you’ll want to start working on this pre launch checklist.
You’ll need to create buzz around the new program and announce it internally before it goes. You’ll need to put together training materials as well have your user list ready. This will probably need to be an excel sheet with names and email addresses.
You’ll also want to make sure you’ve loaded in actual social media posts ready for sharing.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is add all users to the platform.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is add all users to the platform.
