Employee advocacy is a surefire way to have your brain connect with larger audiences. However, even though many people believe it’s easy to accomplish this, several different barriers might hinder the process you and your company are trying to continue.
Companies need and desire to promote their brand and content from the largest corporations to small businesses. Employee advocacy tools are the best way to execute it, even despite what many people might think.
Using employees’ social media accounts can reach a significantly wider audience and deliver helpful content compared with the brand account. These posts from employees can also get more engagements and have identical posts broadcasted to corporate accounts because people can trust employees and generally do much more than they do the corporation itself.
There are some concerns, though, with using employee advocacy. Here are some of the most critical problems and the most significant obstacles you will have to face with participating in an employee advocacy program for your company.
Employees Are Reluctant to Share Brand Content
Some of the employees do not want to share the brand content on their social media accounts. This is expected, especially according to a recent survey. In the survey, about 30% of all employees did not want to share their work content on their social media. They tried to keep their business separate from their social media in their personal life.
Additionally, only 15% of individuals said they didn’t want to ruin social media fun or keep their feeds full of brand content. Another 15% on top of that, so they didn’t want to look like they were automating brand content. To combat this, there are a few solutions that you can try to overcome the reluctance of some of your employees.
Solutions
Personalize Brand Content
Employees can modify the content before they post. This can allow the content to be unique to their personality and feel more confident about sharing those. This will even get rid of the thought that they think they are promoting the content and not having exclusive social media that is genuinely theirs.
Blending Content with Third-Party Media
Companies can also blend brand messaging with third-party media, allowing employees to feel more comfortable sharing it. This will eliminate any concerns for monotony or even introduce diversity in the content shared about the company. In addition, the employees who share this content as a reliable source of intuitive information about the industry in the company they work for will also be seen.
Choosing the Type of Content to Share
Another solution that can be implemented is to allow the employees to choose what type of content and when they post it. They can also tell authors have tonight posted, so they do not feel that they are in an automatic advertising channel for the company.
A reward plan can also be in place to encourage employees to share positive information about the company. This can be in cash or even other incentives to motivate them to share the good news about the company they work for.
Absence of Social Media Presence
This is an obvious problem, as many people who don’t have social media cannot help the company promote its brand. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all employees, but the more employees within the employee advocacy program, the more likely you are to encounter those from generations who likely did not buy into social media as much as others.
Individuals born in the 1970s or later are more likely to share content on their social media than those born in 1960 or earlier. The most positive point from this research is that most of the workforce today is still made up of individuals born after the 1970s, so you’re less likely to run into the chance of the absence of social media profiles from your employees.
Solutions
Necessary Training
Some employees might have stayed away from social media throughout their entire lives. However, if you train them and educate them on social media and its benefits, they might use it more and feel more compelled to participate.
With this in mind, having a reward plan in place might allow employees to feel like they’re contributing and getting something in return for their effort. Training them will give them the tools to complete these tasks, but there is no guarantee that training and compensation will transform a nonuser’s social media into an advocate overnight.
MarketBeam’s leaderboard recognizes the top influencers within a company. The marketing team incentive structure rewards these influencers.
Absence of Technical Skills
There will be specific categories of employees in the company who are eager to promote the brand but don’t know how to. Some of them might have referred to your brand a couple of times, but others are so aloof that they might do something inappropriate. This is why a good employee advocacy policy comes in handy and genuinely can help you inform employees of how to help and avoid making mistakes.
Solutions
Employee Advocacy Policy
As long as you communicate the appropriate content to share and how to use social media platforms, there should be no concerning issues regarding how your employees follow the policy set forth. You can even provide content ideas with suitable captions or even posts that simplify the tasks for them. As long as you give them a pathway to success, they will be more than eager to participate for a desirable outcome.
Share Customer Testimonials
Providing feedback and recommendations is the essential part of any employee advocacy program and how you can work through the absence of technical skills. In addition, employees should be proud to share good words from their customers.
Employee engagement improves when they are well aware of the actual problems they’re solving for the customers and the benefit of their company. Unfortunately, this is often lost in translation; employee advocacy also acts as an employee information tool that they can use to inform themselves of the companies benefits and their advancement.
Lack of Relevant Content to Share
If you’re lacking content that you can share with your customers, this will be an issue for the employee advocacy program. If so, you need to find regular content for them. Sharing third-party content is recommended if there’s not enough unique content to share.
You can also avoid trying to make your employees sell their promoting themselves on social media. This would be a challenging task to complete. It would be very limited in the number of followers and engagement that the employees would get over their personalized content and sharing on the platforms.
Solutions
Newsletters and Publications
You can create your content, but you also need to scoop up authentic and reliable third-party content that demonstrates the validity and support for your company. This can be achieved through signups on newsletters and for publication specific to your field. You can even visit web links for publications of your interest and even follow people who share rich content on your area on social media to give more information to your employees for the program.
MarketBeam Solutions
Finally, the final solution that we can talk about is using MarketBeam. One of the most helpful tools for this challenge is our “Easy and Efficient Social Media Amplification” program, which helps to curate content for the employee advocacy program. In addition, this social media marketing amplification system can empower employees to contribute to building organic leads directly.
Conclusion
You might encounter many obstacles, but these are the most common for employee advocacy programs. With a good strategy in place, you’ll be able to overcome them. If you use any of these strategies above, you’ll be likely to see a significant amount of success in the future.
A potent employee advocacy tool like that of MarketBeam’s can offer you solutions for the problems we’ve discussed and others related to your employee advocacy program. For more information, reach out to us today to learn how we can help you with your employee advocacy program, scale your company, and use social media to your advantage.
