Why You Need Social Media Guidelines

Over the past two months, between attending Content Marketing World and MarketingProfs B2B forums, I’ve had a number of conversations with marketers who are working on launching or revamping an employee advocacy program. Most of these conversations centered around finding ways to gamify and incentivize employees to share company content, or finding tools to make it easier for employees to automatically share content to their social networks.

Although these are important considerations to take into account in building an effective employee advocacy program, they don’t address one of the primary reasons that employees aren’t sharing about their employers on social media—they’re simply not clear on what’s allowed.

You may think that your intentions are obvious when it comes to encouraging employee social engagement. But recent research from Bambu by Sprout Social found one of the most common obstacles that businesses are facing is hesitation from employees. Specifically, 77.3% of those surveyed don’t feel encouraged to share company news on social media. The survey further found that employees aren’t sharing because they don’t know if their company is OK with them sharing news.

Having well-defined social media guidelines in place, and including social media training in new employee onboarding is a prime way to fix this. [Read more…] about Your Lack of Social Media Guidelines is Killing Your Employee Advocacy Program