Why You SHOULD Limit Employee Advocacy [Podcast]

[Episode Twelve of ‘The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast] 🎧👇

Empower your employees like NEVER before!

Organizations all over the world in every sector are driving strategic competitive advantage by scaling the impact of their employees’ voices… and now YOU can too! As we delve beyond the why and get straight to the how so that you can put employee-driven growth at the heart of your organization.

Hosted by employee advocacy practitioner and CEO of DSMN8, Bradley Keenan.

Now, obviously, that may be counterintuitive to all of the other messages that we put out there because we’re very pro-employee advocacy obviously, but there is a logic to this so hear me out.

What tends to happen is if somebody has not run an Employee Advocacy program before, their goal is to generate as much return on investment as possible and the way that you do that is to encourage people to participate. Sounds obvious, but in the process of doing that, people fall into different camps.

You have somebody who is, I guess, proactively against the concept of Employee Advocacy.

Then you have people who sit in the camp of almost don’t have a feeling towards it and they probably won’t become users.

Then you have people who recognise the value in it and they’re going to use it because it helps them in their job, enables them to share to social in a more I guess, controlled way.

But then there’s another group which actually presents more of a risk to you and that is people who are over-eager. So in the process of you onboarding people and encouraging people to use your Employee Advocacy program some people can take that the wrong way and think that the more they share, the better, which I guess is easy to understand why somebody would feel that way and just like with gamification, I know we spoke about this in a previous episode, but when you gamify something, you immediately assign a value against the activity.

So just like in sports, where you score a goal that’s better, in Employee Advocacy someone would think that the more content they share, the better BUT actually has the opposite effect.

Because if somebody starts to share 10-15 pieces of content to their LinkedIn every single day, then the message is being put out there from the advocate that actually this isn’t a good thing because we’re carpet bombing LinkedIn with content, we’re not thinking about things before we share them.

And the same person who’s maybe overeager with sharing is probably overeager when it comes to connecting with people. So what you can create is almost an anti-advocate because this person starts sharing all the content and they’ve also done a really good job of connecting with every single person in the organisation so they’re putting this message out there that actually your Employee Advocacy program is designed. to overshare on social networks, and that doesn’t look great because people looking in, see this overactivity on LinkedIn.

So, for you as a program leader, it’s wise to before you launch, consider how many pieces of content you think would be the maximum amount somebody could share in a day. I post to LinkedIn pretty frequently. I would say every day, sometimes that’s weekends as well and I’ve tested moving to two pieces of content a day and I’m very careful about that and looking at the impact that has.

And what I’ve noticed is that when I post two pieces of content per day, the second piece of content I post will actually almost put the brakes on the engagement from the first piece of content that I posted in the morning. So I try to think about time zones because we have clients in Europe and we have clients in the US. But actually, if I post a piece of content I think is really valuable sometimes it’s better to leave that piece of content running for two days.

So that works, but what happens is you have LinkedIn influencers putting out messages saying that you should post all the time. You know, it’s a cliche when it comes to people like Gary Vaynerchuk obviously hugely successful in his LinkedIn following, but he has that much of a following that he could post 15 times a day and nobody would care.

But for most people, they have say 1000 connections, most people who join an Advocacy program have 1000 connections on average. It’s actually 1,040 roughly.

So if you work on the basis that only around 3 to 5% of people are posting any new content onto LinkedIn, then actually there’s a small percentage of the people you’re connected to that are creating content. So if you happen to be an external party outside of your organisation connected to that person that’s sharing 15 pieces of content per day. That LinkedIn feed would quickly be full up of content produced by you as a marketing team but shared by this individual.

So when we’re advising clients. We would always advise people to limit the amount of sharing to 3 pieces of content a day. But personally, I would say that is more than enough and the other component to this is that in order for someone to share that amount of content, you’ve got to be producing quite a lot of content, which means that once they reach a certain amount of shares, they’re going to start sharing older and older pieces of content to basically hit those same numbers.

So as you’re onboarding users, it’s really important that you don’t just talk about the amount that you share, but focus more on the quality of the content that’s being posted, so we know that if somebody takes the time to select their own content and put their own perspective on it when they share it. The engagements are naturally going to be a lot more than if the person was to use the copy and preview images for the content that a marketing team have supplied even if the post isn’t written as well as a social post that you use as a social media expert could create, there’s because the authenticity just translates.

So the other thing to consider, as you’re putting a limit in place to how much somebody could share think about how many pieces of content that could be in a week.

So even if you say 2 pieces of content a day. If somebody shares that every single day obviously you’ve got 14 pieces of content going out per week and for some that may be too much. So if you are going to encourage people to share daily and you don’t have that much content to produce it’s actually really important that you provide multiple post captions and potentially even multiple images for the same piece of content.

So essentially, if I was to share the content today as an example and my colleague was to share it tomorrow we may have shared connections. So when that is actually shared on social, ultimately, we want it to look different when I share the content to what my co-worker shares.

So there’s almost economics that come into this where you need to do the calculations before you actually go and launch your program.

But the most important thing is that you educate people as part of training to know that this isn’t a quantity game, it’s a quality game and sharing less but with better quality is far better than just sharing 15 pieces of content every single day.

So I hope that was helpful, I will add some resources in the footnotes of the show, just like I do every week. But in the meantime, if you have any feedback about the podcast I’m really excited to hear it from you on LinkedIn. So please do send me a connection request and I look forward to hearing from you on LinkedIn. But most importantly, keep your eyes peeled as I’ll be recording another podcast this time next week.

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