0:11
Jennifer Gutman
All right. Hello, everybody. I'm excited to welcome you to this incredible webinar that we're hosting in December right before the new year. We're going to get started in just one minute. I see everybody's logging on in. We have a great. Call them a cast, great crew, great social media professionals joining us today. And we'll get started in just one moment. All right, welcome. If you're just joining in, I can see everybody's getting situated. We are going to start in just a minute. We're letting everybody come on in. So if you grab a cup of coffee, a glass of water, a snack, whatever it may be, we'll be getting started in just one moment. All right, let's start. So, hello, everyone. My name is Jennifer Gutman and I am the director of customer marketing here at Oktopost. And I want to welcome you to this incredible webinar. Today we are going to be discussing how to re spark enthusiasm across your existing advocacy program. And I have some great peers from the industry joining with me today to have this, this discussion. So I want to introduce you to them. And here we go. So I think what we'll go ahead and do, we can go right down the order. If you want to say your name, your role, the organization in which you're from, just introduce yourself. Feel free to. Yeah, let's go ahead and kick off with yourself.
2:06
Tuija Laaksonen
Excellent. Thanks, Jen. So my name is Tuja Laksonen. I come from Connectrains and I'm there working as a product and industry marketing manager and excited to be here today. Thanks for the invitation, Jen. Absolutely.
2:23
Irina von Witte-Lombino
So I think I'm going to go next. So my name is Irina Von Vita Lombino. I am also working at Connachranes. I'm the corporate social media manager. And really great, great evening to be
2:38
Tuija Laaksonen
here
2:41
Chris Mounsey
and I can finish out. So. Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Munsey. I'm a lead client solutions manager here at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. So work with lots of advertisers on their marketing strategy at LinkedIn and really looking forward to speaking later on to.
2:56
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, Irina and Chris, I want to thank you again for joining us. I want to welcome everybody officially to the webinar. Remind everybody that you are currently on mute. So if you do have any questions, feel free to drop them in the Q and A box. You're also welcome to go ahead and chat throughout. We'll be able to see those chats coming in. So let's go ahead and get started. So I want to kick off by saying so Many of us, when it comes to leading our employee advocacy programs, we really recognize that there is no program that just increases and increases and increases and grows and grows and grows and grows in a perfect kind of incline. What we do see and what we were actually curious about at Oktopost, and we actually ran a study about it and I'll get to in a moment, but we're really curious to understand the ebb and flow of advocacy. Is it natural? Is it normal? If it's flowing, we're doing fantastic. If it's ebbing, what do we do? And we're. We started to see. As we started to examine how our advocacy programs were being run across Oktopost, we started to see, right, it always starts with a kickoff, and you get that enthusiasm super high. And then engagement kind of dips. And then we as social media professionals have to kind of come up with that compelling event to get somebody and the team sharing again. And then we see the increasing up, and then again it dips. And that's the fun of advocacy, right? If, if it didn't do this, perhaps we wouldn't have a job. Jokes aside, we actually, earlier this year we had done a study where we took aggregated data from employee advocacy programs to really understand that ebb and flow and to get a better idea of, again, is this normal? What's happening across the world when it comes to employee advocacy programs and to put everybody's nerves to rest, I wanted to confirm that it is indeed normal to have ebb. And. And the challenge, I would say, or the biggest challenge here, is that we as the social media professionals need to be the one to reignite that excitement around advocacy. And why I've brought these fantastic professionals here today is to talk about how we're doing that in our organizations, how we're able to do that. And then, of course, Chris from LinkedIn, we want to pick his brain, right? What are some of the best practices, especially on LinkedIn, that we know are going to help drive that employee engagement? So I want to pass the mic on over to the connachrains team because they really have been working nonstop around the clock to bring an incredible program to life. And they were radically transparent with me around. This was a relaunch. I want to open the floor. Can you talk us through what can you do? What can others do? What have you done to reignite that advocacy flame and get employee advocates excited again about advocacy?
6:01
Irina von Witte-Lombino
There we go. I'll unmute myself a great question. And we're going to go through this with. But before before we kind of launch into kind of telling about the trips, tips and the tricks, we thought it would be beneficial for you to understand just a little bit, you know, where we do our advocacy at. So we're just going to describe our business really quickly and then get on to those answers. So as the name kind of leads you to think we are a lifting business. Our business is divided into three businesses. It's industrial equipment, where we build hoists and lifting equipment. We have the ports area which provides solutions and cranes to large ports. Industrial ports. I think the best way to kind of imagine that is big container yard and lots of different machinery moving containers all around. Plus then we have service business which gives care to those equipment that we build. We are global. We are present in around 50 countries. We have about 16,600 employees around the world. And our yearly sales in 2021 totaled in somewhere about 3.2 billion euros. Answering about, you know, how you spark your advocates. I think the first thing is that you recognize what is valuable in their advocacy. We in connachtrains have recognized that there is a vast amount of information around the digital landscape. So people listen to people. And when our advocates give voice to the messages that we have, you know that you're more likely to have people stop and see so appreciation of that they have this power similarly to extend to that, you know, they are trusted. They can be the trusted reference point of, of a message. You're much more likely to look at things when, when you know that it's somebody from your network and also kind of acknowledge that your advocates have that ability to. Can give regional context to the messages that you have. You know, overall, I think, you know, it's a balance of giving your advocates or your thought leaders tools to make the best out of the messages that they want to cascade, recognize that, you know, they are beneficial for the company in general. They can leverage their networks and push the messages further. So these are the things that I would kind of always tell your advocates. Always remember to say that you're important and you're a valuable kind of leveraging group for the business in general.
9:26
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And we're going to definitely get into that, you know, throughout the webinar. I'm going to go ahead if it's okay with you, to move to the next slide. Fantastic. So I, I was really impressed, I have to say, you know, when I first saw this presentation, because again, it was geared towards the kickoff and training and what should you include in your kickoff and training and what are the some of the types of tips and tricks that you give to your advocates. What are those tools that, that continued education that's going to help with that ebb and flow to make sure that you're constantly flowing. So tuja over and just go ahead and tell me slide whenever I need to change the slide.
10:02
Irina von Witte-Lombino
I will, I will.
10:04
Tuija Laaksonen
So thank you Chen. So originally. So I've been leading the first of all this advocacy program in the EMEA region with my colleagues. And originally we started in 2021 in autumn. We had a three months pilot period and of course we saw the impact of employee advocacy right away. So that was really exciting for us. And we run the first part around seven months and then we had a pause for multiple reasons and then we relaunched the program again this autumn and we have now around 40 advocates from eight countries from the region EMEA and we create content based mainly in English even though we have countries that are non speaking English. But English is our language for the employee advocacy program. But when from the first start we identified two main challenges in our program. And the first one was that advocates tend to share the content as it was given to them. So there was not much customization ongoing. And the second ones that they usually share all the content, shared all the content at once on the same date. So this resulted in a great volume of the same content at the same time. And that was not our purpose when we started this. So next slide. So first let's go through some tips to lead your advocacy program next. So these six tips are actually from your Oktopost training when we started the program first time. And the first one, be mindful of your post infrequency. So our advocates they receive on Tuesdays an Oktopost mail that is basically a summary of all the new content and it's a really nice reminder them about the advocacy board. And earlier they shared all the content at once and we identified this challenge and now with the relaunch in this kickout training we really went through that. Hey, you have to think about the frequency. And on Octopusbot there is a really nice feature that you can schedule the post for LinkedIn and you can visit the port at once a week, but schedule posts throughout the whole week which is really convenient from advocates perspective so they don't have to remember the visitor board. And then second tip, customize your posts. And we will go through this more in detail in the next slides. But as the advocates share content from their personal social media accounts as themselves, so they should really care about what they are sharing and how does it look like, and this was the thing that we really highlighted in our kickoff training. And third tip, really put one, engage back with your audience. Of course, if there is someone commenting your content, always react at least like it, but preferably reply back. And if you are able to start discussion, it means always more engagement. And Irina, would you tackle the next three tips?
13:39
Irina von Witte-Lombino
So we have tag company pages and profiles. Obviously, if you're contributing to the message from your own personal profile, it's really good to tag your company pages, use the relevant hashtags. So, you know, when you come look at results, you can kind of filter things with those hashtags within your kind of the company measuring matrix. And obviously, you know, if you have already groups that have the right target audience, think about, you know, if it's better to share those posts into that relevant audience where the message resonates really well.
14:22
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely.
14:22
Tuija Laaksonen
Thank you.
14:25
Jennifer Gutman
What's really impressive, right, you really took this to your advocates to really make sure that they understood the why and like, and also the how, right? But it's not just about, hey, share this content, but let us give you some tips. And I know Chris, on the end, we're going to go through some of these in details, right? Like, hey, LinkedIn, are hashtags even relevant anymore? So we're definitely going to get to that. I want to move forward to the customizing of the content. Oh, this is such a pain point for so many of us because I don't know about Team Kona Cranes, but I know for so many of us, we're looked at as marketers and we are marketers. And so whatever we say to a lot of sales professionals or perhaps other members of the board, right. They think because we wrote it, that must be the way it needs to be, right? And then we're sitting here kind of trying to flip the script to say, hey, listen, just because we're the marketers and it doesn't mean that this is going to sound authentic in your voice, right? So we're trying to change that message of hey, be yourself, right? Be authentic. And this sometimes, I think clashes with kind of getting advocates sometimes into that ebb or kind of maybe delaying some of that engagement because they're just as you guys were sharing, sharing as is. And this can be a challenge for so many of us. So how did you overcome that?
15:46
Tuija Laaksonen
This is really good question. And what we like our advocates, they reach a decent amount of people on monthly basis and we really wanted them think about the impact, okay. People seeing the same post over and over again of Course, the impact of the message decreases and it can be seen spammy. But then people seen the same message presented in a different way with your own tone of voice. The visual is the same, but the content is a bit different. It most likely will strengthen the message when it's repeated in your own words. And this is something we are really, really trying to do and change with our advocates. So please go to the next slide. So what we want, we wanted to visualize to them that hey, here is this imaginary LinkedIn feed. It's one of our advocacy posts and we discussed with them that how do you see this? And yes, they agreed it can be seen a bit of spammy. It's quite monotonous. There is a lack of your own voice and not so interesting. Okay, same picture, same content over and over again. But then next, then we presented the second image, a bit of customization. So the visual is still the same, the main message is still the same. But they can put a bit of effort putting their own words into the content. And most likely people are going to read what you say with this, you can go to the next slide. So we said that, hey, we understand you are not copywriters and you don't have to be, but you can add your own tone of voice with small phrases and make it more personal. And we are not preventing them editing the whole content, but there has to be connection with the visual or link and the copy text. And also if there is any corporate news or announcements, then the factual content has to be as it is. But it doesn't prevent you from sharing your own opinion about the topic or if you want to celebrate something or whatever. So you can always add your personal touch to the content. You can go to the next slide. So we gave them some food for thought, some easy and simple ways to start the content with, to start personalizing the content. And they, they took this quite well. And of course we said that, you know, this is not the least you have to go through with each of the posts you create or share from the board. But think about starting like this and it's much easier than to start adding that your own ton of voice to the content.
18:47
Jennifer Gutman
You know I have to add in here, right? If we think back to that circle chart from the beginning, right, that compelling event. What I really loved about how you handed this to your advocates. To us as marketers, oftentimes these hooks seem so like marketing one on one or like social media one on one. But to many of our advocates, giving them something as simple as this Whether it's a printout they can put on their desk or maybe as you know, part of the advocacy program, you make some mouse pads and everybody who's a participant gets a mouse pad with these hooks on it. So, so that they're constantly thinking and there are these little tricks that are all around them and we're not kind of throwing them into the wild that they sink or swim, but we're really giving them the tools to help. So I was really impressed when I had saw that you had given this to all your advocates, all the different hooks, right? Even kind of the tone, if you read through these and how you would expect your advocates to help make their messages more authentic. So I just had to throw that out there
19:44
Tuija Laaksonen
so you can go to the next. So in our training we gave them multiple examples from the content from the, from the advocacy board we have created where we have created the content and just showed them how, how easy it is. You just have to start. So if you click yes. So we gave them these kind of examples of the customized content, like start with a question to raise an interest or discussion and connect the content to your role. So for example, with this content, if you are part salesman, why don't you ask people to contact you directly for more information and also always adding to relevant hashtags. So ConnectRace is a global company, but we have a strong local presence and therefore we always ask them to add country hashtags to the company content. We always of course offer them those generic ones. But to make it more local, you can go to the next slide. So we challenged our advocates to do these things. So consider on timing, try scheduling and adding their personal cuts and customizing the content, but always keeping the connection between visuals or link and copy text. And also have fun. So basically like when they are extending our brand's reach and increasing online engagement, but most of all, they are positioning themselves as industry thought leaders. They are building up their personal professional profile. So keeping that always in mind, you can go to the next one. So at the end of the training we gave them a bit of provocative message as this is important topic. So like, if you don't have time to add the personal touch, think again and consider, do you need to share the post at all? Because you can always come back later to share the post with your own tone of voice. And you may now ask, how has it went? How has it gone? So we can see that our advocates are nowadays sharing the content throughout the whole week. They are either scheduling or then going more often to the port. And also they have started to add their own tone of voice. So the customization has started. But we of course understand this is a journey. The change doesn't happen overnight, of course. And we are also like having a monthly communication with our advocates where we always try to find ways to remind them of these topics. And also we share the content from the advocate colleagues who have done really well and challenged them that can you do the same for the next month? But that's it from my side. Back to you, Chen.
22:49
Jennifer Gutman
I think so. First of all, thank you so much. And I think one of the things you just mentioned, right, and this is one of the things that if you have a notebook and you're taking notes or you know, you're typing on your highlight, it, underline it, but the monthly communication, right, it takes 60 days to form a habit. And I think many of us need to remember that when we're getting our advocates involved in a program, we need to be able to help them form their healthy advocate sharing habits, Right? So by giving these tips, by having that monthly engagement or whether it's quarterly engagement, but finding that rhythm of where you're talking about best practices, which we're about to hear from Chris, where you're talking about, right, the hooks or what posts look like that would be in your own voice and helping our advocates become thought leaders and gain that confidence on social right, that's such a huge part of a program leader's job. And I just want to commend you because I know it is so not easy, right, to relaunch and to train and to make sure everybody's up to speed and you're really doing a fantastic job.
23:51
Irina von Witte-Lombino
And maybe just to finalize the point that Tuya made about sort of, I said recognition of our advocates, but it's also direction. Like when you're doing advocacy work, you need to kind of also kind of remember that it's for your own benefit. You're creating your own thought leader position or advocate position like that. So you know, all of these things that you do and you, you personalize it and you have that power to influence your network, it comes back, it's for you as well. So that's a big kind of reigniter and motivator in every way.
24:33
Jennifer Gutman
Couldn't have said it better. So now we have Chris, who's going to keep us honest with ourselves and maybe he's going to tell us we're doing it all wrong. But Chris from LinkedIn is going to talk to us now about leveraging employee advocacy specifically on LinkedIn, and hopefully we'll be able to ask a few more questions. I don't know, maybe he'll be able to expose a little bit of how the algorithm works. Maybe we'll have to see. So, Chris, over to you.
25:05
Chris Mounsey
Thanks, Jen. I'm sworn to secrecy on that. No, I'm only joking. We don't have full insight either. I think it keeps us safe from that side. But hopefully I can share a little bit more on employee advocacy from a LinkedIn point of view and, and give you some, some actionable tips that you can take away, take away today. So if you want to flick on, I thought it'd be useful just to start with, you know, why employee advocacy, you know, why, why these are so powerful. And I think from LinkedIn side of things, we see this as being really powerful in two ways, both in terms of driving employee engagement. And so, you know, engaged teams can drive greater profitability and there's a reduction in absenteeism and turnover. But I think even more importantly, it can really help you grow your consumer and talent brand. And so, you know, executives really believe there's a strong connection between consumer brand and employer brand. But I think this was the most powerful stuff that I saw that on average, companies have 10 times the employee connections compared to company followers. So, you know, every company that we speak to, pretty much every company on LinkedIn is going to have a strategy for their organic content, what they post on their feed, you know, daily or whenever they post. But not every company has that employee advocacy strategy. So this just shows why it's so popular. You know, if Your company has 2,000 followers, your employee connections might have, you know, access to 20,000 people there. So that's why it's so important to think about that and how you can leverage it most. So what we lay out is kind of a groundwork for how you can really develop an effective employee brand advocacy program. So, first of all, and I think it's really important to define clear goals and objectives. So, you know, what do you actually want to achieve out of it? You know, are you just doing it for the sake of it, or do you really want to achieve some actionable goals out of it? So, you know, for example, is it increasing engagement with your content or growing followers? Is it around actually growing hires? You know, do you want to drive more talent and drive more hires, or do you want to generate sales leads from this? This will really, I suppose, help define, you know, what you want to do and what direction you'll go in with your Strategy next really important to create channels for communication and being really transparent. I think the guys earlier already touched on this, but it really requires open communication with your, with your employees. You're not going to get buy in unless people understand why you're doing it. Also how it's going to affect their daily workflow and also what's expected of them. You know, people can hear, oh, we're rolling out this program and think that's a lot of work. On my day to day I just want to concentrate on my day job. But if you make it really clear, you know, okay, this is just one post a week or you know, this is what we expect, it can really just get more people bought into it. Another tool to really help buy in is getting buy in from your senior leaders in your company. So you know, if people from your C suite or other senior leaders and really voice the importance of this in internal comms and actually get involved themselves. So you know, if people see them engaging and being part of it, it's more likely that they will engage and be part of it too. I think this is really important then too. It's like having a diverse team of content creators. So you've lots of employees with different interests, different personalities and this kind of reflects your customer base. So you know whether you want to have someone, a few people from your engineering team talk about the product and the quality of the product that you have. If you want to have maybe people from your talent, talking about, you know, what it's like to work at your company or you know the benefits of someone potentially joining and you know there's lots of different people you have within your company. So don't just focus on one particular area and have a lot of people from that area. Try and get diverse with it and with your program and then finally just launch it. So you know, once you've done all the hard work and the simple thing at the end is actually just to, to kick off and launch things. So we've just broken it out into some advice for companies so actionable things you can take away and also some advice for employees that we'll touch on later. But just to start with some advice for companies and how you can get the most out of a thought leadership program. Really simply like just make sure your page on LinkedIn is completed. If you've completed an active page, you'll just get much better with your objectives and achieving your goals. And so just make sure, you know, simple things like descriptions, locations, website, URL. Just make sure you have a really complete page before, before starting any program. And I think this is really important then to cover. It's, you know, great content lives at the intersection of three key things. So, you know, don't just pick topics that you want to talk about. Really think first about what are your audience's biggest challenges or interests, what do they care about? So really have a think about that first before kind of getting into anything else in your content. Next thing to look at is where do you have expertise and credibility and then finally, how is what you're saying different and authentic to you? So you know, people are seeing lots of content on the LinkedIn feed and what's going to make it different and authentic to your company? What's going to make it stand out? We call them scroll stoppers on LinkedIn. Sometimes you know what's going to make someone actually stop scrolling through the content and stop at your company and realize what you have to say. So think about those three things and think about what really lies in the middle of those three things.
30:18
Jennifer Gutman
And I want to just take a moment here and add, right, for any of us who are thinking about relaunching, right. Or if we think back to that ebb and flow, this is where a survey to your, your advocates or even your entire organization if you want to really gain more insight. But taking some these three points, these three circles, right, and incorporating that into a survey, if you're looking to create thought leadership content for the board or if you're trying to understand, right, who are the audience of your advocates sending out a survey and then taking their feedback to really better create, you know, more engaging content or spice up the program or make it more engaging, that can really help. And we've seen this be done, you know, before a first time launch. We've seen it been, we've seen surveys be rolled out quarterly where in the beginning of the program they'll launch a survey and in the end they'll launch another survey and compare. And we've seen it done annually as well. You know, each time they complete a year they'll go through and ask their advocates. And again, it's all an attempt to keep employees engaged. So this is a great slide. If you are creating those surveys to take a look at, to try to get some of this information directly from your advocates. And I think it will help you be able to guide that program.
31:31
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to point out a quite a useful tool. So you know, looking at what, what your audience actually cares about. LinkedIn has a handy tool, content suggestions that you can use to discover trending topics and articles. So if you're a page admin of your LinkedIn company page, you can navigate to the content suggestions, you can filter it by, you know, certain areas, industries, job functions and you can see what content your target audience is engaging with across LinkedIn. And that can help. You know, even some of it could be very topical pieces of content that then you can kind of, you know, give your own company's take on it or share some interesting insights on that. So definitely worth checking out on your company page. Another suggestion on what to post is make it a two sided conversation so it doesn't always have to be, you know, really original content and highly produced content and people really find it valuable where, you know, you just ask questions and you share your own insights. So course there did a good example here where they asked people, you know, what courses are they taking from their program and got lots of engagement there around talent. It can be really powerful. So you know, Netflix just asked, you know, what are your burning questions about working at Netflix? So really simple question and you know, got lots and lots of engagement on it and you know, really builds up more, more kind of interest in what it's like to work there. Also got people thinking about, you know, God, would I like to work at Netflix? You know, that that's somewhere I could see myself working. So there's lots of ways you can do this. But think about just asking questions to, to your audience and generating engagement there and then testing your messages. I think this is really key and it's something we get asked a lot as, you know, working for LinkedIn. We get asked, you know, should I be writing short content, should I be writing long for my content? You know, what visuals should I use? And there's no right answer. You know, different things work for different companies and different audiences. So play around with it, see what works for you. You know, pick some metrics around engagement or whatever you're looking for and see, you know, what works with, for your company so you can play around with things like tone. Again, you know, if you're naturally your company isn't a playful or a funny company, then don't try and be something you're not. But you know, play around. You want to be more serious or do you want to provide more informative content? Copy length is a big one. Do you want to, you know, test some short pieces or much longer pieces and visuals like visuals are key. People process visuals much faster than they do any copy and it's generally what's going to make people stop and so play around with different visuals, you know, see if you can, you know, create some sort of theme of visuals that's going to make people stop and generate more engagement and then more content formats. So we'll cover this in a bit more detail. But thought leadership from your sex always work really well. Company news and updates and job postings and perks. A lot of your following is going to be, you know, potential talent or potential employees. And so people always like to hear about perks and different job openings that you have.
34:26
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And again, if we're thinking about kind of relaunching or reigniting our advocacy program, I think what's nice about this piece. So in Oktopost, you can create a very specific employee advocacy bi dashboard and you'll be able to see the tone and you'll be able to understand all of these different elements that Chris just mentioned to be able to understand and be able to test and broaden your content mix. Excuse me.
34:52
Chris Mounsey
No worries. And yeah, next is just make sure to include some hashtags with each post. So I know, Jen, we had a discussion on this and we're not saying, you know, have hundreds of hashtags in there, but just have a few in there that are relevant to the content that you're speaking about. For example, here, in this example, you know, if Davos is happening or the World Economic Forum, make sure to have those hashtags in. So when people search those hashtags, your company's content is going to show up. And yeah, this is just a bit of a game plan for, for growing followers. So feel free to to screenshot this if you'd like and have a little help. Helpful guide as to what we'd advise for growing your followers. So there's a few different things here, starting with once off, just asking your employees to update their profile with their current employment. I'm sure most people do and you know, most people do keep their their information up to date. But just asking people to do it if they haven't can help, you know, generate more people, you know, following your page, adding the linked your website and then daily just linking to your page and all of your marketing comms. You know, that can even include asking people to put it at the bottom of their emails, you know, in their footer, having a link to your LinkedIn marketing page and then posting daily. We really recommend posting daily to establish a trusted voice. So developing content, that content schedule that you can post that frequently.
36:15
Jennifer Gutman
I'm going to stop you because I have a question when you say post daily to establish a trusted voice, is there a best practice? Should that mean once daily and then you're good and not punished by the algorithm? Or is that like three times daily? What. Or does it, does the algorithm. It doesn't really matter.
36:33
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, the, the algorithm, I, I wouldn't be able to, to speak to and, and give, give those intricacies. But I can say, like, what we found for companies that have, you know, got the most success out of the platform is they're posting once or twice a day at least now. Again, you know, if you have tons of content, if you're a massive company and, you know, maybe there's lots of things for you to post every day, absolutely post that. But it's better to post quality over quantity. So, you know, don't be posting loads of times a day just for the sake of it. As long as you're posting once, twice a day max, and that'll be plenty for you to kind of get that quality engagement. But, you know, again, if it's all about your company, your tone of voice, your content, and so again, that's something you can test and play around it as well. If you want to try and post more frequently, see if that works. If you want to, you know, once, once or twice a day, that's, that's plenty. But definitely try and post at least daily.
37:27
Irina von Witte-Lombino
Just, just a small comment in here because sometimes we get worried that, you know, if you post too much, they kind of eat each other's space. So. So it's kind of good to hear that sort of the one, two, twice a day is sufficient anyways.
37:45
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, that's important as well, is, is sometimes there's lots of people who maybe have things they want to get out and kind of say every day. And there's different people wanting to post different things. So I think it's important to be really strong as well and kind of not just be posting absolutely everything out in a day either just because different teams want different messages out. You know, look at your content calendar and, you know, really focus on, okay, is this, is this quality that we're posting every day or are we just trying to keep all our internal teams happy? And thinking back again to, you know, that content, it's like, what does my audience care about, not what does my team want to post every day? So, yeah, just thinking about that as well. And I think quality over quantity. But then as well, I think, you know, there's other ways you can, you can really get Engagement through your page, like replying to comments and engaging for further discussion. So you know, you can actually comment on people's posts or other companies posts or different things like that, like LinkedIn itself, comments on people who've got a new job or you know, different things like that. And it ends up getting huge engagement and people love to see it. So you know, even thoughtful comments like that, like don't feel like you can't do things like that either, that can help you get engagement. Then looking at a kind of weekly, reviewing your analytics, like see what content works best, where are the gaps or opportunities, really kind of review those, see what content's working best and use that in your future content strategy. And just make sure you're publishing a broad content mix. So for example, if you really focus in on product and you're pushing sales the whole time, maybe people who want to become an employee or following you to potentially get a job, maybe they're not going to be so interested in your page or they're not as likely to follow. So try and have a broad content mix, think of who is following you and then, you know, publish content that's going to engage all those different, different people. And then monthly, you know, you can do things like you can invite followers to your page, you can encourage your employees to reshare content and look at kind of switching up hashtags like, see, are there new audiences that you can reach testing out new hashtags. There are things you can do on a monthly basis. So finally then just some, some advice for your employees. So first of all, I thought it would just be nice to share a quote from our former CEO and now Executive chairman Jeff Weiner. So I think this is really important to, you know, whether or not you're a CEO. You have a professional network with whom you want to interact, inform and influence. Engaging more effectively on social media can give you an edge. So you know, for everyone, whether you're just starting off in your career or your senior exec by actually just engaging and being active on social media, sharing your voice, sharing your opinion, it can give you an edge either in your current job by, you know, networking and discussing things with people or potential suppliers, or potentially get you a new job in the future, you know, by building your network that way and showing your expertise on the platform. So you know, you're not just being part of employee advocacy just for your company to push that, you're also doing it for yourself. And I think that's really important to kind of show employees that, you know, it's for them also that they're building their network and they're building their brand on the platform. So just some best practice tips for sharing updates. So you know, be authentic. Like while, you know, brands may be able to play around with a tone of voice or change things slightly, your network are going to know you know, who you are and what your authentic voice is. So don't try and be something you're not. It's very hard to do and you know, you'll struggle to keep that up in the long run. And post frequently. So similar to company pages, like make sure to post frequently but it doesn't have to be daily but like pick a frequency that works for you and stick with it is what I'd say. So you know, whether that's weekly, whether that's once every two weeks or whether it's daily or a couple of times a day. Like pick a realistic frequency for yourself and post that often. Start a conversation or share your point of view. So you know, don't just share things. And I know the guys touched on it earlier, like don't just re. Share something like share your point of view on it and people, that's what people want to hear. They don't want to hear just something that you're just resharing with. No, no insight. Use rich media if possible. So images, videos, they always really help and create an opportunity for response. So you know, get people chatting like in your conversations, like under in the comments, like get people chatting in there. That can, that can be a really useful tool and it will, it'll make you show up in their, their networks feed as well which, which can be really useful for growing your, your network. So these are kind of the four ways that you can activate on, on LinkedIn. And so articles, I think if you're a subject matter expert or you know, you have lots to talk about in articles, they're brilliant, brilliant piece and format. They're definitely not for everyone. You know, you really have to delve deep into a subject to kind of get the most out of them. But you can actually kind of build up a following for particular articles, which is brilliant and short form posts are really common. You know, just no, no kind of media in there or anything but just, just sharing some quick insights or you know, experiences or even feedback on, on an event you were attending or anything like that. Video is, is, is hugely growing at the moment. So you know, if you can include video and it can be really, really powerful whether it's, you know, just your takeaways from an event. Whether it's, you know, your thoughts on something that's just happened in the industry. It doesn't have to be Oscar worthy production, it can be just recorded in selfie mode on your iPhone and but it can work really, really well. And then probably the, the kind of forgotten piece or something people don't really consider that much is actually just commenting on other people's posts. So you know, people in your network, it pops up on your feed and just giving a comment on that that's going to, you know, get you shown in their feeds, in their network's feeds and it's going to just, you can show your subject matter matter expert there without actually having to create your own original content. You can just reply, you know, giving your, your opinion or your thoughts on something. And finally I suppose at LinkedIn we like to think, you know, we don't just talk to the talk, we walk the walk. And these are just some of our senior execs and definitely worth giving them a follow on LinkedIn if you want to see, you know, how they've employed approach their sort of content on LinkedIn. Henry Price on the left here as our vice president of marketing solutions he used to like during COVID basically every Monday share his walk to work. He just share a quick video on his, you know, giving some thoughts on, on different things, whether it's what's going on in the world at the moment, you know, any sort of updates in the marketing world, different things like that, you know, just literally a selfie video on the way to work and he got huge engagement and people really, you know, every Monday morning they're expecting to see this in their feed and you know, really engage with it. And then Don Shapiro is our COO here and he's brilliant on the platform. You know, as someone who's kind of I suppose in such senior leadership position and people are really interested in his insights and his thoughts on different pieces. So you know, whether that's interviews he gives, you know, really insightful kind of thoughts around, you know, what, what his best interview questions are or you know, how you can make meetings more productive or different things like that. So you know, it's just from his own experience but it's really authentic and generally generates a lot of, a lot of engagement. You can see here like nearly 3000 likes and 162 comments on, on one of his posts around meetings. So yeah, definitely worth giving them a follow to, to get some inspiration. But I think that's it from me anyway, so hopefully People found that that useful.
45:16
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So we're going to open it up now for Q and A. And I just wanted to say thank you to everybody and you know, the, the purpose really of this webinar as we're rethinking, you know, we're looking into 2023. We're thinking about our advocacy programs, we're thinking about what we can do to be keeping, you know, our advocates engaged into advocacy well beyond, you know, Q1 of 2023. So we hope that there's some ideas that you can take away from this presentation. Perhaps when you're framing your workshops, you know, take some of the story from Connor Cranes and from Chris over at LinkedIn and maybe help your advocates really understand, you know, the power of advocacy. So with that said, I see some questions coming in, so I am going to go through. Let's see. So here's a good question, I think for Connor Cranes. Chris, if you have any insight at LinkedIn, feel free to chime on in, but we have a great question. Right. How do you choose your initial advocates? Is it based on their audience? Is it based on their authority? Who did you pick for the pilot?
46:16
Tuija Laaksonen
Well, I can take this one. So basically we approached the countries we knew who wanted to be part of this program and they source the advocates from their sales teams. So we have basically salespeople as advocates at the moment. And they were asked, do you want to participate? And the ones who said yes came into the program.
46:42
Jennifer Gutman
Okay, so we have another question specifically for Tuya. What was the biggest challenge that you experienced when you launched your employee advocacy program? And if you knew then what you know now, would you have done anything differently?
46:58
Tuija Laaksonen
Well, from the content producer's point of view, the amount of work it takes to produce the content for the board. So I would include more people into that and create kind of network who are all producing content for the board. And from the then advocates point of view, I would put more hours into supporting and training them perhaps. So one hour training, it was not perhaps enough. I would put more time into it and discuss with them directly more rather than just communicating via email.
47:39
Jennifer Gutman
And I have another one for you too. Yeah, how does.
47:42
Tuija Laaksonen
Okay.
47:44
Jennifer Gutman
And Irene, I'm sure you can, you can chime in as well, but the people are curious. How does Konecranes measure the success of your advocacy program? What metrics are you looking at or what kind of success criteria do you consider a successful program?
47:58
Tuija Laaksonen
Well, we are of course looking at this user metrics, the reads, impressions and from the content point of view, we are looking at which content is performing the best and try to get ideas for the further content from there. So we start resonating best with the audience. And yeah, these are the main measurements we are using.
48:23
Jennifer Gutman
Chris, is there any as like a follow up question to that? Are you seeing any metrics that we should be focusing on that LinkedIn would consider kind of important to look at?
48:36
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, I think it depends on, you know, what you're trying to get out of your program. But like I think from a LinkedIn point of view, like looking at your posts, kind of engagement and then also you're like company page following. So obviously the more kind of you can generate in your company, the more followers you should hopefully be looking to get. But again I think back to kind of one of my, my first slides around, you know, it's what, what you want to get out of it. So if you're focusing more on your sales team and you want to drive more sales leads, then you know, you can actually try and look at kind of at that, that, that, that stage of what you're trying to do or maybe it's more around talent or different things like that. So yeah, different things like eng followers I'd say across the board, but then more specifically to what your goals are from the program as well.
49:21
Jennifer Gutman
I have one for Irina. Chris, thank you. So Irina, we have someone on the webinar who would like to understand was this a marketing initiative or a marketing. Was this. Hold on, was this a marketing initiative or a marketing initiative or both? So I think maybe the person that wrote that one, maybe they can retype it. But I guess the pain here is that if you're struggling to find budget for an employee advocacy program, do you have any advice on where or which teams I can go to to find it?
49:52
Irina von Witte-Lombino
I mean this is something as well which Tuya can talk about. But to be honest, you know, I think it's about convincing that it is useful for me. Like I think earlier also in Chris was mentioning that, you know, if you, if you're a business and you have a followership, you know, people have then chosen to follow you. With advocates, you leverage their network and you leverage the message that you can cascade further because the person who is an advocate is not just from your industry. They work for a long time, they have more people than probably a diverse set of people in their network which then can kind of create a ripple effect in a way that if your content is really good, if it's engaging, then you can get more breadth and width to your voice by using your advocates. So I think when it comes to convincing a C suite or if it. And there is also kind of, you know, somebody was saying that, you know, I'm begging people to kind of post my stuff. You know, I'm in teams. And the thing is that you, I think, you know, social is a current thing. We all make need to be present there, especially if we're marketers and, you know, if we work there. So it is a benefit for yourself to be an expert. It is a benefit for yourself to build your voice in there. You know, it will carry and it will bring benefits. Yes. In business, but also for yourself. I think that's, you know, that's when you choose your advocates, you say it is a commitment that you're doing as well for yourself.
51:32
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely, absolutely. And thank you. And anyone who really is looking to run a pilot or we're always here at Oktopost, happy to help get creative. If you're having any budgeting issues, just feel free to reach out. I have another one for Chris. Not sure if you're gonna be able to answer this one, but I'm gonna ask it. So there's a lot of chatter about the LinkedIn algorithm and what it is and cannot do and what it does and what it does do with advocacy content. Are you able to share anything from behind the magic curtain on how that works?
52:13
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, I like, again, there's nothing I can say or have access to around the algorithm and how it prioritizes. What I would say is we have at LinkedIn something called a content marketing score that every company kind of has. And if you do have a LinkedIn marketing solutions account team, now, not, not everyone has one, but if you do, it's definitely worth asking your team for this. And it measures, you know, basically it gives you a score and it's based on three different things. It's your organic presence, your paid presence, and then your employee advocacy presence. So, like, they're equally as important in that content marketing score. So, you know, it's something to. That LinkedIn considers as valu. As, you know, other pieces in the, in the platform. But in terms of, you know, the algorithm, there's. There's nothing I can kind of share or reveal on that one, unfortunately.
53:07
Jennifer Gutman
I've got another one for you, Chris, and then there's a few more for everybody. So there's someone here said, I recently read that Oktopost is now a trusted LinkedIn marketing solutions partner. What exactly does that mean?
53:21
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, I suppose, Jen, you could probably touch touch on that as well. But I suppose from, from our side, you, we have a limited number of certified partners and Oktopost is obviously one of them. So it just means there's increased support and engagement between Oktopost on LinkedIn. Also for ourselves as kind of account teams, if we're working with our clients, we can get more support and engagement with Oktopost. If we're looking to I suppose either implement it or if there's any kind of troubleshooting or anything like that, we can, we can provide more support from, from our side as well. But I don't know Jen, if there's anything else from, from your side that
54:03
Jennifer Gutman
you want to add, you pretty much nailed it. You can expect, you know, to see some LinkedIn faces and we'll probably be doing a lot of joint initiatives just to get some of those best practices. I want to. I see some. Another question just came in for Irina so I'm just going to throw it back to Irina. What has been Connocrine's best performing advocacy post? If you know it offhand or what, what is for Kona Cranes considered the best performing content?
54:29
Irina von Witte-Lombino
This is probably something that Tuya is kind of like monitoring the data. Overall, I think what Chris was saying about having dynamic content, videos are great. Usually if you have something that is moving image and has a great storyline, that's the one that gets engagement. But Tui, I don't know if you have a, a good answer for that.
54:55
Tuija Laaksonen
Well, I can see in general the content including people performs really well because it's really easy to relate to people. And that one content about world's largest Collier we produced that was a hit.
55:12
Irina von Witte-Lombino
I was about to say that to you but I wasn't sure. You know we have Goliath Crane and it's incredible and big and that's where, where I said that, you know the videos are great.
55:23
Jennifer Gutman
So we have. The videos are fantastic. And you know, as Chris also mentioned and you know we are seeing that videos are quite rich media that's quite rich and heading into 2023. I just. There's a comment here from Sandy that helping out with the budget question from earlier that she actually was able to get the program running out of sales enablement and funded from the sales ops budget. So for anyone thinking or might wanting to activate their sales team, that might be a good place to look. Let's see, there's a question here. Where can you find the LinkedIn marketing score?
56:00
Chris Mounsey
Yeah, sorry. So that, that would just be available through. If you did have an account team at LinkedIn. So yeah, it's, it's only available through if, if you have an account team. But yeah, it's something that they can provide as part of, part of the service.
56:16
Jennifer Gutman
Awesome. Awesome. There's a few more, like three more questions and then I'm going to thank everybody. And of course, if anybody has more questions, you are welcome to connect with any of us. Tuya, what measurement are you using to not put you in the hot seat, but what measurement are you using for ROI to present to the board?
56:36
Tuija Laaksonen
Well, this is a good question. We are looking at, at the, well, the performance of our content, like the followers on LinkedIn or Facebook, how those has increased. Usually they have. That's the trend. So we don't basically have any specific budget for this unless the cost for the tool itself. But when we are now are planning to increase the program to other countries, include other regions too. So at this point we are looking at this more in detail.
57:17
Jennifer Gutman
Good answer. Always a little stressful when presenting to the board. So I think that could be very helpful. And then this is the last question. So it's for Irina and Tuya. So this participant's asking. So at my company we have about 200 employees and our advocacy program is moving forward. Basically though, it's me posting and copying onto Microsoft Teams channel and begging colleagues to publish these posts. I do think a solution I might be reading. I do think a solution is needed because it's not really scalable. Your program sounds amazing. If I were to look to go ahead and kind of roll out an advocacy program, find the right solution, what would you recommend I look for in a solution? What did you look for? What was like the game changer? It's a very good question.
58:14
Irina von Witte-Lombino
Like I saw that earlier and that's what I was kind of commenting on that, you know, when somebody, I think there is a good way of convincing people is also benchmarking, you know, how does it, you know, increase sales? So find benchmarks to show that, you know, it is beneficial. Convince those people inside that it is beneficial for them to become an advocate and join into thought leader action. And you know, just overall I think, you know, kind of mentioning that this is current, this is, you know, we do it nowadays. If you don't have advocacy, then, you know, especially if you're relying on organic messaging, then, you know, it's a tough one to battle to kind of conquer. If you, if you don't have those personal voices say people listen to people and that's it. So like I was Saying content with faces, content that, you know, speak to more on a one to one basis are the ones that win over engagement.
59:23
Jennifer Gutman
All right, and then last question, because we're hitting time and this is open Connor Crane's team, I think this is directed at you. How soon have you seen Impact when you ran your three month pilot program?
59:39
Irina von Witte-Lombino
You go ahead. It was really.
59:41
Tuija Laaksonen
This is a. Yeah, this is a good question. So we saw, of course, some increase in number of followers, but like when we started the program, the aim was to increase our social media presence in certain areas or countries where we don't have any local accounts or anything like that. And yes, we were able to see right away, like we started that we are more present in these countries on social media. And then this way we were able to see also from our followers that we are gaining followers from these countries. So quite immediately, like after one month, perhaps already we were able to see this change.
1:00:29
Jennifer Gutman
That's fantastic.
1:00:30
Irina von Witte-Lombino
I was really impressed about the impressions that we gained with our advocates.
1:00:37
Jennifer Gutman
Do you, off the top of your head have a number or is that. I know that we didn't ask you to prepare that, but you're. We know it was in the thousands.
1:00:48
Irina von Witte-Lombino
Like, you know, you know, it was impressive. Yeah, yeah.
1:00:51
Jennifer Gutman
Within that month. No, no, we, we were talking about it internally. You did have a very impressive rollout. So with that said, I just want to go ahead and thank everybody for joining us today. If anybody does want to connect with us, feel free. Right. We're going to eat our own dog food. We've. You can connect with us, of course, on LinkedIn, you can email us and we're always happy to talk about the program. We're happy to talk about Oktopost, we're happy to talk about LinkedIn, we're happy to talk about the Oktopost LinkedIn partnership. But thank you all for joining. We had a great time and wishing everybody a very happy, healthy and safe new year and very happy holiday season.
1:01:29
Chris Mounsey
Thanks everyone.
1:01:32
Tuija Laaksonen
Thank you.
1:01:34
Irina von Witte-Lombino
Thank you. Have a good one.
