Changes to Facebook Provide Opportunity for Employee Advocacy Strategy
At the beginning of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change to Facebook’s algorithm. The social network is now prioritizing content from “friends, family, and groups,” not brand content or news. Zuckerberg points to fostering more meaningful interactions between people on the site as the organization’s reasoning for the change, but Facebook recognizes that brands will have to work that much harder to break through the clutter on users’ newsfeeds.
Facebook Tools
To help brands stay relevant on Facebook with this change, AdWeek recommends using different tools that Facebook offers within the platform including:
- Facebook See First feature, a tool that helps users prioritize the information in their newsfeeds.
- Facebook Live which is video content streamed in real-time that has proved to be the leader in engagement averaging 6 times the interactions of non-live videos
- Facebook Group function, a tool that allows brands to cultivate communities of invested consumers or clients interested in company news or thought leadership.
- Facebook Local, which will include your business for crowd-source recommendations for Facebook users.
- Facebook Messenger, a great tool to communicate directly with your audience
These tools allow brands to interact directly with their audiences and create a meaningful interaction that Facebook is trying to foster among its users.
Promoting Employee Advocacy
Furia Rubel encourages law firm and corporate clients to devote more time to employee advocacy because it helps promote firm content and news due to Facebook’s algorithm changes. Employee advocacy refers to the promotion of a company by its own workforce. Because people tend to trust their own friends and family over brands, employee advocacy is a great tool to get your message to a wider audience. Employee advocacy also encourages an engaged staff and boosts morale in the workplace. Employees can act as some of a business’ most important brand ambassadors and help the brand stand out in a newsfeed filled with branded content.
After establishing clear social media guidelines and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important for your business, encourage employee advocacy through social media training for employees, regular sharing of company content and incentivizing participation in employee advocacy. For example, the employee that posts the most frequently receives X hours of paid time off. Engaging employees through this advocacy, helps the company’s external messaging and boosts company morale, creating a better workplace culture overall.
Employee Advocacy Tools
Many tools are available to make employee advocacy easier. For example, ClearView Social is an employee advocacy platform that organize your business’ or law firm’s news into an email that prompts an employee to share the approved content. Adrian Dayton, Founder of ClearView Social, said, “Law firms often ask me, ‘how can we get more followers/connections/likes for our posts to our firm Twitter or LinkedIn pages.’ This is really the wrong question. Our research shows that your lawyers get 8x more engagement when sharing that same content to their personal pages. Firms need to start asking, how can we get a larger number of our lawyers and other professionals sharing that content.”
ClearView Social answers this question by making it easier for attorneys or other team members to share content with their personal connections. The content is automatically shared at the most strategic time of day for the specific social media platform. With this easy tool, you can measure the employee advocacy impact and reward individual employees appropriately. It can be used with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.
Social media’s rapid changes, specifically Facebook’s recent algorithm change, may seem daunting, but with implementing these simple strategies, you may see even higher engagement on your business’ content. Stay tuned to Furia Rubel’s Marketing and Public Relations Blog, for news and analysis on any upcoming news in social media.
