This article pretty much sums up what is, let's not say wrong but "naive" with employees and social media right now.
Let's take the sections:-
1. Social Media guidelines. Absolutely, and they need to cascaded to everybody. Problem is, that many have either been written by IT or the legal department. The outcome after reading them is, this posting stuff is too hard and as it reads like I will get fired, I won't bother.
2. Social Media Workshops. Totally, everybody is at different levels, but this is about a change. Yesterday I couldn't talk to the press or I got fired, today you want me to post on social media. Sorry but hints and tips training and fact based training does not create the change needed. Taking 1. into account above, people have to be empowered. Just giving 150 power points and sending the employees back to their desks does not get the majority of people backing this as a project.
Let's also remember, that nobody (your buyers) are not interested in a "corporate suites" plus we are all "Energetic, tenacious, and hard working" this is about setting us apart. Fact based training won't move the needle.
3. Creating Interesting Content - Absolutely! Sorry but nobody reads corporate content. It all sounds the same and becomes just noise. So how do you empower your people to write material?
4. Let The Personalities Shine Through
Agree with this 100%, but by sending out some guidelines and doing fact based training. I'm sorry but this is naive to think that this will change anything. Certainly just automating the posting of corporate content will create more unfollows than follows. At my previous company when I posted corporate content I lost followers.
Get your employees to write blogs! We recently trained a glue salesperson. I use this example as everybody says "glue isn't exciting". But this person wrote a 300 word blog, made glue exciting. They are after all excited about their job, what they sell and their company. And when I'm in the market to buy some glue, I will buy from them!
5. Encourage Likes, Comments and Re_shares
The problem with this is it turns what is probably excellent content into corporate spam. Turning something that probably took money and time to create for it to become worthless with over sharing.
We see it on LinkedIn all the time, a group of people all sharing the same material. People just see this as sad.
6. Champion Employees To Share More Content
Absolutely, but people will only share content that are empowered to share and they are given guidelines to create. Just going to the employees and saying share more content or providing fact based training won't change anything. Also in my last company, the sharing of corporate content was automated and then everybody wondered why there was no follower to growth. To the point that people just talked to themselves or other people in the company. This was no amplification.
If you are going to go down this path there is great benefits - hope was never a strategy.
Good luck!
It’s inevitable that employees will be sharing on social media and in fact, many companies are now investing resources to encourage their workforce to get online. Yet, the concept of getting employees active on social media or “employee advocacy” is not new and has been a growing marketing strategy for the last few years.
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