0:01
Samson Kovacs
Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar, Social Media Success Through Employee Advocacy. So I am joined today by our partner Martin at Oktopost. So, hello, Martin.
0:13
Martin Fuchs
Hello, Samson. Good morning, everybody.
0:16
Samson Kovacs
So, just to let you know, we do have three very short poll questions during the webinar. Now. We're going to run a very quick poll now just so everybody knows how to use that, and it'd be really interesting to know kind of what's your reason for joining us today. So if we'd like to launch that poll now, that'd be great. So we're gonna let that run just for a few seconds. That's great. 38% interested in optimizing. Great. And 28 want to implement. So that's really good to see. So we'll close that. We'll close that poll now and share the full results so everyone's got full visibility. So I'll just start off with just a little bit about myself. My name's Samson Kovacs and I work as a Digital Marketing Consultant, SuccessFlow, and I manage all manners of social media campaigns for our global client base. Social media advocacy is one of the things I specialize in, and I really hope to share some of the kind of knowledge that I developed using the Oktopost platform with you on today's session. So, Martin, over to you. Would you like to introduce yourself?
1:24
Martin Fuchs
Thank you, Samson. Hello, everybody. My name is Martin Fuchs, account executive at Oktopost. We are B2B Social Media Management platform, and employee advocacy is a core tool within our social media management platform. And I'm delighted to be joining Samson in presenting employee advocacy with you guys. And I hope you enjoy.
1:45
Samson Kovacs
Thanks, Martin. Okay, great. So we'll kick straight off into what is employee advocacy for those of you that might not be too sure at this point. So employee advocacy, as you can see on screen, there is a term to describe the exposure that employees of a company can actually generate for brands using marketing assets. So while social media is often the main medium for employee advocacy, these online assets could include email, chat, forums, discussion boards, and blogs, for example. So the majority of brands today aren't really utilizing their biggest marketing asset, which is their employees. You can see on screen some of the facts that we've got there on the right hand side, 1000 employee advocates can actually reach up to a million customers. So you can see there's a massive potential there. Now, the concept of employee advocacy has been around for quite some time and it does date back to before social media and before really The Internet even became popular. Now, in the past few years, the term employee advocacy has become a bit of a buzzword, so particularly in the HR world as well as marketing. And many companies now are kind of scrambling to jump on this bandwagon of employee advocacy without understanding some of the core concepts that actually make a program successful. So, as a bit of a word of advice, businesses really need to start looking at their employees as more than just people who are hired to provide a service. Our lives are so entwined now with digital media. It's really important to see these individuals as people who can help maintain and nurture your current business relationships whilst attracting, more importantly, new customers. So we have got another poll here, and really, if we launch this poll now, it'd be great to find out from our audience if you currently have a strategy. So, quite simple, it's either yes or no or maybe you're interested in having one. So it'd be really great to see those answers coming in. I'll let that run for just a couple of minutes. So, 48% of people on the webinar are interested in having one. So that's always good to hear. And as predicted, myself and Martin were having a bit of a chat before this webinar began, and we did suspect that only a small number of people at this point would have a strategy in place. So those 7%, we would like to kind of show how you could maybe improve that strategy or a way to actually kind of improve on what you've already got there. So we'll hide those results now and we'll continue with the presentation. So I'm going to hand over to Martin. He's going to go through the employee advocacy challenge.
4:31
Martin Fuchs
Okay, thank you, Sampson. So, first up, before reviewing the main challenge points, just some interesting stats. As you can see on the slide, 93% of sales executives have not received any formal training in social selling. So this is something I can vouch for. I've been in sales for six years and all the social selling that I've been doing is via trial and error. Another interesting point is 53% of salespeople want help in understanding social selling better. And this fits into the topic. We're talking about employee advocacy, which we believe is a very big part of social selling. And you'll see later on in the presentation. And the third point here is almost 19% of salespeople are unaware of the value of social media. So, as Sampson mentioned, we're interconnected in social media, but at the same time, when it comes to everybody except the marketing team. Not really maximizing social networks to generate new business leads. So what are the marketing pain points? Communicating employee advocacy to your employees. So the first step is onboarding. How do you get people on board? How do you explain to them how to use employee advocacy so it can benefit your business? Second point is sustaining growth and increasing engagement. So let's say you do onboard a new tool and employee advocacy is a big initiative within your team. How do you not only get them on board, but how do you stay consistent to maximize the effect of your employee advocacy campaign? And the third point which is very important is measurement reporting program success. How do you define what is success and how you measure it? Does the tools that you use provide you the ability to measure success? Employee advocacy so the biggest challenge within employee advocacy may seem daunting at first, but addressing these concerns will actually serve as an invaluable guide to ensuring program success. So just to repeat, onboarding, consistency and measurement are the three main challenges and opportunities for success in employee advocacy. And our next slide is the importance of employee advocacy. Why is it important? So again, three interesting stat points from our friends at Success Flow. So the first one on average employees have 10x followers than there's corporate social accounts. And this just makes sense. Just taking your sales team for example. Chances are they're highly connected on LinkedIn and use LinkedIn as a very important tool within connecting with clients or evaluating clients prospects before connecting with them. Chances are they have a much more Robust Network on LinkedIn or Twitter when it comes to connecting with prospects. Another interesting point is 54% of salespeople have tracked or closed deals back to social selling. So this goes back to the first point is salespeople. Your salespeople might be the most connected people on social and one of the most at your core target people within your company to onboard employee advocacy. And the third point is brand messages are we shared 24x more frequently than when distributed by employees. And that just makes sense because if you think about it, when your employees are sharing the content, it seems more organic and usually chances are will be shared more. And the points here don't miss the opportunities. Today every employee is a potential spokesperson for your company. It's important for employees to articulate what their company stands for, what you hope customers and clients will get from the company. It's in addition to that I just want to add by allowing your employees to share social content, company social content, they become authorities within their vertical. Employees can be a valuable tool in connecting with real people and having conversations with them and potentially leading these people to purchase your goods and services. And then going back again to the sales example, if you think about it, salespeople are the most connected to prospects and to current clients, which these clients are also connected to potential clients via the network effects. So employee advocacy is very important and a very big opportunity, in my opinion, for your company.
8:52
Samson Kovacs
Absolutely. Thanks a lot, Martin. So we are going to run another poll here. So we'd really like to know from the audience what is your main social advocacy challenge? So we're going to launch that poll now and as you can see there, there's a few options on screen. Maybe you've got a lack of a tool or maybe you struggle with reporting program success. Now, Martin, I'm sure you'll agree when people come to us here at SuccessFlow, reporting program success is often a key challenge. Because one of the things that I'm going to mention a little bit later on in the presentation is some of the tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, the native platforms themselves don't really offer a good insight to what kind of impact employee advocacy has. So be interested to see if that comes out as a key requirement. Okay, great. So a very big mix across the board there. So 33% of the audience are lacking a social media advocacy tool. So it's good to hear that in a way because we are going to demo a little bit later on in the presentation a really great tool from Oktopost. So hopefully that will help you on today's session. And social media teams lacking training. So again, kind of to be expected. Great. So we'll close them results now and we'll continue on with the presentation. So I put this picture up in the presentation slides. When I saw this had been released by Facebook, I thought it was a really great way to show how marketing is happening in an interconnected world. So these are showing all of the Facebook connections in all the kind of major countries and how it links across the globe in a visual way. Now, historically, the six degrees of separation is quite a widely known theory, which is that everything is six or fewer steps away by way of introduction. So from any person in the world, for example, through a chain of a friend of a friend. Now a 21st century view of this is that each person in the world, or at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook, is actually connected to every other person by an average of 3 1/2 people. Now that's really almost cutting that initial theory in half. And I think what this shows is that it's providing a whole new opportunity for online marketers and a well grounded social media campaign can actually reach more of your audience than maybe your email marketing database can help you with. So on the next slide here, what you'll be able to see is going to be our five steps to success when it comes to implementing a social advocacy strategy. So I'm going to run through each step. So under plan, we're going to look at content policies and benchmarking for implement. We're going to talk about starting small and kind of reaching more people over time, running a pilot and getting buy in, communicate. We're going to be talking about selling the idea and kicking it off. So encourage a really important step. We're going to talk about incentivizing and reminding your advocates and reporting. We're going to cover some major points here such as creating a leaderboard and choosing the right platform. So I'm going to kick straight off with the plan section. So failing to plan is planning to fail. Always interesting statement. So do take a look at that. So in order for companies to build an effective advocacy campaign, planning is really important. It gets the groundwork in there to allow you to build success upon it. And really the first step in this is defining the company brand and tone for your social media content. Now, it's essential that you create all of your posts with this in mind so that people reading your content on social media recognize your company. So the tone and brand should be synonymous with not just your social content, but with your web, email and physical printed content as well. So people who may have seen some of the social posts that we've put out here at successflow for Digital Week, all of the branding and messages are consistent with the email invitations we sent out, for example. So you should have seen a consistency there with our own assets. Again, really important to set your goals. So we would really kind of advise you to use smart objectives to help achieve your end goal. So that means they should be really specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. So without these kind of smart objectives, your advocates are probably going to be less likely to put effort into the program. So it's really important to kind of set them goals early on. So as you noted in the poll previously, social media training plans are really important. So we saw in one of the previous slides, 93% of sales execs have not received any formal training on social selling. So there's a huge opportunity that's been missed here. And to be an early entry into this kind of social advocacy space, it will put you kind of a step ahead of your competitors in a social media perspective. Without the training, it'd be more likely that your campaign could be prone to mistakes and that can affect your online brand. So do make sure to include training plans in your social media strategy. And then really important, build your employee advocacy program on good content. So there's so much content available online now on Twitter, on LinkedIn, Facebook, and really what that's changing in a social audience perspective is how people view content. People are becoming a lot more choosy and selective, so choosing content from people who are renowned for providing good content. So I wouldn't recommend starting an employee advocacy program if you haven't got that good content available. It will have an adverse effect on your results. So I'm going to move on now to the implement section. So thinking big, but starting small. So from our experience here at Success Flow, the most successful campaigns start with a small group of engaged advocates and it's these people who actually become role models for onboarding other people within your company. So the great thing about social media advocacy is that social media reach can be increased dramatically even by the smallest groups. So I'm going to use an example now of one of our global legal services clients. They actually increased their reach of their social posts by 63,000 people through the use of just five employee profiles over the course of a three month pilot. Now that just really shows you just how reach can be increased really quickly and using a really good social media advocacy program. So there are a few things that we can recommend for you to actually maximize this reach. So firstly, choose your most connected employees. Those people with bigger valid connection bases will actually produce better results for your program. And also find your most active employees. Anyone in your organization that might be an avid social media user, they're going to be more likely to take take part and actually go in and share the content and then run a pilot. So show your team what's possible through advocacy and just how easy it can be to get kind of hit the ground running really. So for many companies that we've worked with on social media advocacy, because this is such a new concept, it's taken a few weeks for the sales teams to kind of get onboarded to such an easy process of sharing out posts from their personal profiles from the company page, but the results have been phenomenal. So definitely something to consider. So as you can see there, employees do have 10 times more followers than their corporate social accounts. So the way companies are looking at social media is changing. So not just looking at their LinkedIn company pages or their Facebook page likes, but looking more at who their teams are connected with. So making sure they're connecting with the right individuals in their industries. Great tip there. So moving on to the Communicate section. So making sure you communicate your project plans and your implementation schedule is so important to keep your team on track. And as time goes on, you can engage more members into your advocacy fold. So one thing that we would recommend that's worked really well for some of our clients here at SuccessFlow is actually getting your partners involved, sharing content and social media posts. It shouldn't just be limited to your employees, after all. And this way, your reach is increased further and your campaigns will have even more impact. So every project that you run will benefit from the input of your advocates. So whether this is feedback on which days are best to post, for example, so some of your employee advocates might say, we, we'd like to receive new content on a Monday because that's when we have the most time to go and schedule a week's worth of content. It's really important to keep your advocates happy during this process, so to make it easy for them and so it doesn't become kind of a laborious task to get them kind of involved and getting them kind of on board into the process. And then a really important point here is to actually provide support to those people that might have a little bit less experience when it comes to social media. So new social features become available pretty much daily. So I work with social media pretty much exclusively. So I'm always on Twitter, always on LinkedIn, and every day that I go in there, there does seem to be some kind of new feature or a feature change. So one thing so that your activities aren't interrupted, we'd recommend you keep your team updated with these. So make sure they're in the know. If there's an opportunity for them to use a new feature, then let them know, because keeping that communication open is really important to the process. And then use a range of different social networks. So I know that we have a mixed audience today. So some of you are kind of from B2C companies. So most of your target networks might be on Facebook, for example, or Instagram. So for B2B, the B2B audience here definitely look at LinkedIn and Twitter. So. So, and use a mix where appropriate. It's always great to get a good mix of channels on a social media advocacy program. So the encourage section, really important because once you've got a campaign underway, it's Easy for people to kind of forget that it's happening. Or maybe they share two posts and they think that's kind of their work done. So I'd recommend maybe having a monthly competition for which of your employees share the most content, for example, and that really helps people, helps your advocates participate more in the scheme. One thing that we suggest is that you could actually provide incentives. So maybe linking social advocacy into KPI sheets and having these clear goals, as I said earlier on in the process, will really motivate people to keep on sharing. Platforms such as Oktopost Board, they do have the ability to send content reminders. And we find here at successflow, this is really useful. On our employee advocacy tool, which is Oktopost Board, we'll get a weekly roundup of which new posts are available. Or if our marketing team sends out a host of new posts on a Monday afternoon, the Tuesday morning at 10am, we'll get a reminder saying that there's new content available to share. It's just a great way of keeping everybody in the loop with maybe new campaigns that are happening. Again, set realistic goals. It'd be really kind of counterproductive if you was to ask maybe your marketing team or your sales team to go and share 200 posts a month. Really, as I said before, starting smaller is the way forward. So making sure people get on board with the process and actually start sharing, maybe you could maybe set a benchmark of maybe 10 posts a week to start off with. Then if you're seeing a really good engagement and an uplift in the kind of reach and engagements, then you might want to increase that on a week by week basis. It's good to kind of review quite often so that you can find out which way to steer the campaign in and then finally benchmark previous month results. So campaigns which are highly successful motivate more activity from the advocacy team. But if you are running a campaign, for example, that's not showing a good level of results because maybe your advocates aren't sharing, it's really important to keep them updated with how the other advocates are doing because that in itself can create a little bit of a competition between your staff and get people motivated to keep sharing and then finally report. This brings us nicely on to reporting, I suppose. So as I said before, the native channels, LinkedIn and Twitter, they don't provide comprehensive enough analytics. So let's say, for example, for those people that are letting their company employees know that they have new posts available on the LinkedIn company page and to share directly from there what you won't see is what impact your employee advocates have had on them posts. So you can't distinguish between your kind of organic traffic on that page to what the sharing and the advocacy has done to that particular post. So really important that you track the shares, the comments and more importantly, conversions. This is something that a lot of people struggle with when it comes to social media management. So a lot of marketing teams we have spoken with here at successflow, they're struggling to show the return on investment of social media activity. And one thing Oktopost is very good at doing and you can see this on the right hand side of the screen, screen, it shows you in a really nice kind of impactful way what impact the social media posts are having. So you can see how many posts have gone out, you can then see how many people that has reached in terms of a potential impression. And a little bit further down the funnel you can see how many people have clicked on them, particular posts that have gone out. And then following on from this is how many people's converted. And when I talk about conversions here, what I'm referring to is the people who have gone on and done what you've asked them to do through the post. So let's say your call to action is to download a white paper or maybe register for a webinar. A lot of people can't attribute webinar signups or media file downloads to a specific person or a lead. Now what these new tools such as Oktopost allow you to do is through HTML tracking, you can actually see who has gone on, on social media and downloaded your piece of content or registered for maybe an event that you're running. So that again, it's really important to track those conversions. Again, share the results not just with the advocates, but key stakeholders in the process. Social media advocacy programs on a larger scale for corporations obviously can take resource time and money to kind of set up. So it's really important that the key stakeholders and decision makers are kept in the loop about how successful these programs are being for you. And then again, just choose a platform which gives you analytics, which are quick and easy to read, a lot of marketers which will be on today's session. I know that one of your pain points is having tools which offer maybe too much information or don't present it in a format that gives you any kind of real understanding of what's going on. So, so again, choose a platform which provides you with this in a really nice way. So you can see some of the examples on screen there. So I'm going to hand back over to Martin from Oktopost now and he's going to show you just how the demo of Oktopost works. Over to you Martin.
25:23
Martin Fuchs
Thank you, Samson. So, just a brief two sentence intro. Oktopost again is a B2B social media management platform that caters to B2B companies where the core value is the ability to really measure ROI in terms of new lead registration, webinar, white paper or any type of conversion action. And employee advocacy is part of our tool set. So as you can see here, the first step is on the admin side, meaning the person managing the employee advocacy tool and that is inviting advocates. So you can see here, very easy to do. You have the user section where you add the name, email and the message section where you invite the team members with a short introduction to invite them to register. The next slide shows you again an admin side of our employee advocacy tool is sharing content. So you need to share content with your team members in order for them to share on their social networks. So as I mentioned, Oktopost is a social media management platform and one of the core functions is distributing social content on social media networks. So you can see here, this is a posting box where you pick the social network. The social profiles add the content targeting and date and time of send. But as you can see here, there is PIN to board. The Pin to board section allows you to share content with your employee advocacy team and all you need to do here is click pin. Once the content is pinned, the content will be shared with your team members and as Samson mentioned, team members will get a notification the following day at 10am we did this on purpose in order not to frustrate team members by notifying them with multiple emails, but just providing them with one email per day. And that way it doesn't strain the communication between the marketing team and the team members participating in the employee advocacy tool. And here is a notification. So team members will get an email notification notifying them that a new post or inviting them to connect. And as you can see there's a share now redirect URL which they click and it will transfer them to the employee advocacy tool. Here you can see this is the login for the employee advocacy tool. Once the team member registers, they will be asked to connect to social networks. Once their social networks are connected, they will be able to share posts with one click. As you can see there's a small share icon. All you need to do is click share. So there's no need to copy and paste. Very easy to share. And going back to participation and measurement on the team member side, Oktopost's employee advocacy tool, as you can see, there's a leaderboard chart where team members can compete against each other and see who is leading in terms of monthly shares, weekly shares, monthly clicks and weekly clicks. And we see a lot of our partners doing monthly competitions to incentivize participation of team members. And then going back to the admin side of the employee advocacy tool, the marketing team or the social media managers can not only share content, but they can go back and see how many user sessions, how many shared items, what's the potential reach, etc. And then finally measure real impact, meaning real conversions from posts, impressions to clicks to conversions. One of the core values of Oktopost is not only sharing social content, but being able to measure and see does this social sharing impact your bottom line in terms of new business leads, new webinar registrations, etc. So with the Oktopost employee advocacy tool, you're able to measure not only the shares, the reach and who's sharing the most, but also the bottom line conversions. Overall, this provides added value in terms of not only reach but also impacting your real business goals.
29:39
Samson Kovacs
So really it'd be really interesting to find out from our audience if they would need any help setting up an employee advocacy program. So we will launch that poll now and find out some information from our audience. So maybe, yes, you are ready to explore this further or maybe it's something that you want to do in the next couple of months. So it'd be great if we could just get that feedback from the audience. I think just while that poll is running. Martin, we did have a question which kind of ties in with this actually nicely from the sign up registration forms. And one of the questions was how do we see employee advocacy changing in the future? And so for those of you that might have responded on this poll for yes, in a couple of months, I think what we're going to find is that more and more companies are kind of integrating this as part of their social media strategy. So not just using this as a kind of a standalone tool, it's going to become a lot more integrated into a marketer's approach to social media. Would you agree, Martin?
30:47
Martin Fuchs
Most definitely, Samson. And that is, I mean that's the way Oktopost views it. We are, as I mentioned, a social media management platform, but we feel that employee advocacy is a very strong pillar within social media marketing and that's why we built the employee advocacy tool as part of our social media management platform.
31:07
Samson Kovacs
Great. So we'll close that poll then. So thank you for everybody who has responded there. We do have a case study now which Martin's going to cover off and just show you some of the impact that some of their employee advocacy schemes of hat. Sure.
31:23
Martin Fuchs
Thanks Samson. So many of you may know this company, Kapost, it's a content management platform based in the US they are partners with Oktopost and before using Oktopost, their social media team worked with tools that were too focused on B2C. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of great B2C social media management tools out there that measure likes, shares, retweets in terms of engagement reach. But at the end of the day for a B2B company, the bottom line and the reason that they do social media marketing is to generate new business. So Kapost contacted Oktopost and became a partner of ours in order to use our tool to improve their B2B social media marketing. Some of the key reasons that compose Oktopost, and these are the things I did not mention previously, is in addition to our employee advocacy tool, which was one of the main reasons they were interested in this, they also use a marketing automation platform. They use marketo and Oktopost integrates with Marketo and with other marketing automation platforms by providing the social click data to the marketing automation platform. And finally, the third reason Kapost chose us was the ability to measure real conversions from social media content marketing. So Kapost onboarded 81 employees that were actively participating and they saw a huge outreach in terms of social media distribution and conversions and they were very happy with the results. So overall, just to summarize, Kapost was able via their 81 team members to really increase not only increase the reach in terms of social media reach and branding, but also generate additional leads via the social media content marketing initiative, which they weren't able to do previously with other tools that didn't allow them to measure real results.
33:30
Samson Kovacs
I would like to ask the audience if you'd like to connect with us, please do so. We do have a LinkedIn group, it's called B2B Digital Marketing Insights. We often post content about social media advocacy and social media strategy on there, so please do take a look. You can also contact us via our email addresses which are on screen. And thank you very much for your attendance and thank you Martin for joining us today and presenting on today's webinar.
