There’s a good chance that the answer to both of these questions is yes. If it is, have you thought about training your employees to use their social media accounts to share content related to your business in a coordinated way? If not, you may want to consider it.
Why Develop a Social Media Training Program?
According to employee advocacy platform Everyone Social, brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees then by official brand accounts. But why is this, you may ask? It’s really quite simple. In an effort to keep social media platforms (particularly Facebook) relevant to their users, platforms must ensure that users are seeing the content that their most likely want to see – think pictures of a friend’s wedding, a new addition to your brother’s family or a family reunion. To ensure the user’s experience is optimized, several years ago platforms started limiting brand content. For example, on Facebook, the reach of a brand’s post is now limited to 3-5% of it’s organic audience (unless a post goes “viral” which is nearly impossible without promotion). Think about this… you’ve worked hard to build a Facebook follower base of, say, 10,000 people. When you share the content you’ve put hours into developing, you’ll receive at most 500 impressions.
Building an employee advocacy program is a great way to circumvent platform restrictions for the following reasons
- Your employees’ personal pages aren’t restricted the same way your company pages are, so they are able to reach a much greater percentage of their followers.
- Consumers trust content shared by other consumers more than they do content shared by brands – with some studies having this number close to 80%.
Will a Social Media Employee Advocacy Program work for Your Small or Mid-Sized Business?
So you may be thinking, “a social media employee advocacy program may work for big brands with thousands of employees, but it’s too expensive and complex to set up for my small or mid-sized business.” The good news is, that it’s not. These programs can be as complex, or as simple as your needs dictate. We’ve developed dozens of these programs at businesses of varying size and complexity, and we would love to discuss what this might look like at your company by offering a free consultation.
Learn more by downloading our free 10 page beginners guide below.
