What are the best practices for training and empowering your employees to be social media advocates?

It's key to have external social media guidelines for employees, one of the biggest blockers to employees engaging on social media is fear of doing something wrong/against company guidelines. So even more important to ensure those guidelines are easily accessible & easily understandable. It's worth considering creating them in different formats for different learning styles. And if you have an employee advocacy tool, have your guidelines prominent on there for all members of the program to easily access.

Based on our experience, we've learned that it's crucial for employees to have a solid grasp of their personal social media presence before entrusting them with the responsibility of managing others' social media accounts. Our online habits extend across all platforms we engage with. If an employee lacks mindfulness on their personal platforms, it's only a matter of time before these habits spill over into their professional space. Such habits can have either positive or negative effects. While implementing policies, setting expectations, defining responsibilities, and establishing best practices are essential, they can't instantaneously rectify "bad" habits.

Ensure your employees are equipped with foundational knowledge before launching an advocacy program. This includes: - Social do’s and don’ts - what good looks like - use examples - Why do they want to be active? - What’s in it for them as employees - How it supports the business

Be mindful of your employee maturity levels. They vary and you need to vary your social media training accordingly. For example: - Activate - social basics, policy, guidelines and tools - Accelerate - commenting, sharing, engaging - Advance - content creation, blogging, podcasts, videos

If you are investing in an employee advocacy tool it's really important to populate that tool with content that is not just branded content. Employees as advocates on social is hugely powerful, but to be seen as experts in their field they will need to share & engage with 3rd party content as well as branded. Investing in great enablement is also key. Each employee advocate will start at a different level of social maturity, so consider having bite sized training available around a range of topics to help them level up from whatever their starting point. E-learning can be a great option for this & can easily be targeted to groups of employees identified through your Employee Advocacy tool analytics.

Gamify your employee advocacy program but be cautious how you reward and recognise. Focus on: - Rewarding points for engagements, not # shares - Provide swag for different tiers of maturity and progression - Employees love certificates - let them get certified and badged - Give them priceless experiences - recognition at the town hall, roving reporter at annual kick-off

It is vitally important for team members to connect content creation to the mission and the focus of the brand. For example, our team produces content for the television program Rob on the Road on PBS KVIE, which explores the unique spirit of Northern California. If a team member generates social media content for the brand, it must tie in with our greater experiential mission. We don’t just promote places to go, our brand is about creating memories and connecting the journey to the awe inspiring experiences found through PBS. Show and tell what needs to be captured, just remember it’s about the cohesive mission and not the messenger.

Community is everything when scaling your social media advocacy program. Facilitate this by: - Hosting regular training sessions to keep your community coming together for refresher courses - Create a Teams or Slack channel for your community to talk to each other and answer questions - Host ‘Office Hours’ for live Q&A sessions - Provide cohort bootcamps to onboard and accelerate new employees into the program.

Start your program with people who want to be there. Those are the people who will engage & create the valuable stories that you need to help engage more people. It's relatively straight forward to find who from your organization is already active on social media, they could be great advocates for the program & also be a great source of content for the program, content that works for them & could also work for their colleagues.

Achieving good results requires team buy-in. Regardless of directives, it is crucial for team members to genuinely believe in and fully support the ultimate goal. When we have a strong belief in something, we naturally align ourselves in the right direction and respond positively to guidance. When developing our teams, it is vital to seek their organic viewpoints on their responsibilities in relation to the company goals. Team buy-in guarantees maximum support and focused efforts towards the true objectives. With a unified vision, distractions can be overcome more easily, and time can be managed more efficiently, as the team is invested in the "big picture."

Monitor content being shared but don't be the social media police. Unless your team has posted something detrimental to your brand, let them develop their own tone-of-voice and act as a guide to support them.