How to motivate employees to share content and avoid sharing fatigue

When it comes to organic reach, scalability, and value for money, nothing beats social media platforms. Especially if you know the right levers to pull to get your employees involved in sharing company content.

Marketing studies show that customers don’t really interact with brands — they interact with people. On average, content shared by employees sees 8X more social engagement* than content shared by corporate social accounts.

Now, we know this sounds good and you might be tempted to bombard your employees with even more content to have them share it with their networks. There’s just one little problem with that — it doesn’t work in the long run.

Constant content pushes come with a short-term spike in social shares but, ultimately, they result in diminished engagement and a decrease in employee-content interactions. 

We call this phenomenon social sharing fatigue, and we’re here to show you how you can avoid it.

How to avoid social sharing fatigue and motivate your employees

We noticed that some of our users struggle to get their engagement and advocacy initiatives off the ground. Not only were their employees not sharing company content, but they weren’t even accessing it on the platform or opening new content notification emails.

We dug deep to find out why that was happening. After analyzing platform data and surveying our users, our diagnosis was indeed social sharing fatigue. The company was constantly trying to push out content and asking employees to share it. In turn, this made employees feel like they were only a means to an end — a tool for social media exposure. 

Naturally, as soon as employees start feeling that way, companies see a drastic decline in overall content engagement, resulting in fewer social media shares and significantly less reach.

Our study showed that companies that rely on the “content push” approach to advocacy can suffer up to a 17% decrease in content engagement. And the disengaged employees disappear from the map completely when it comes to content interactions. If the same pattern persists, in two years, that advocate drop-off will rise to 34%.

Let’s put those stats into perspective

Say you have 150 employees in your company, 75 of which are participating in your social advocacy activities and sharing company content on socials with some regularity.

Every month, their shares and content interactions result in 25,000 organic impressions and 800 engagements for your brand, including shares, likes, or clicks.

In year one, your content push strategy causes 17% of your advocates to drop off. That’s 13 people less doing that extra work to boost your branding and visibility. Consequently, your reach and engagements go down; you’re now getting around 20,700 impressions and 660 engagements. 

In year two, you lose 13 more people (that’s 26 advocates gone now, which means you’re down to 49), which translates into 16,500 organic impressions and 528 engagements.

You can try to replace those with paid ads, but to do that, you’ll have to put a lot of money into it, and we know how expensive platforms such as LinkedIn or Instagram can be. And still, a question remains: would paid ads get you the same results?

What I’m trying to say here is that you should never downplay losing employee advocates. They are not easy to replace, and there’s nothing in your marketing toolbox quite as effective as they are.

There are ways to re-engage and reconnect with employees who’ve stopped interacting with your content, but they will all cost you money and time, which is why the best thing you can do is prevent this drop-off from occurring altogether.

How to stop social sharing fatigue from setting in

Our research shows that the key to success here lies in varying the type of employee engagement and advocacy campaigns. Here are a few ideas to open up those communication channels and encourage your employees to remain tuned in to your content:

• Use surveys and polls. Ask people what they want to share on social media, what kind of perks and rewards they’d like to get for it, and stuff like that. 
  
  Then, act on the information you’ve collected. Don’t let that data sit there to collect dust, or it’ll seem like you don’t care about employee needs and wants.
  
  
• Ask for content submissions. They can be original employee content or posts and articles they’ve enjoyed reading or learned from. As long as they’re industry-specific, it shows openness and interest in your employees’ lives and ideas.
• Don’t shy away from “big asks”. Asking employees to leave a review on Glassdoor (or something similarly “big”) can seem intimidating, but it works when it comes to mixing things up. Don’t do it too often, but also don’t be afraid to give it a shot every now and then.
  
  
• Recognize your employees’ efforts. Implement a reward system in the company so that you can incentivize your employees for one, but also entice them and trigger a more eager approach to social sharing of branded content.
  
  
• Distribute company merch. Company-branded equipment and gadgets such as headphones, mugs, water bottles, laptop cases, and things like that will catch the eye of every employee, we can guarantee that!

Why is this super important for you?

We want you to start mixing things up because that’s how you’ll improve the reach within your organization, and you’ll be able to see up to a 27% increase in engagement with your branded content. 

Again, the key to success in this situation is motivating existing employees to share more company content on social media and transforming neutral employees into advocates. In the end, what it comes down to is less money spent on paid advertising and a group of employee advocates who are amplifying your social messages and strengthening your employer brand.

That’s the lane you want to be in — you want that engagement and advocacy software you’re paying big bucks for to do what it says on the label. You want it to increase your scores across the board, not decrease them. 

You do indeed need to give it a little push, and that consists of actually interacting with your employees, and providing inspiration, motivation, and benefits they’ll be attracted to. You can’t take advantage of their networks for social media shares and reach. You have to entice them, give them a reason to want to be part of your growth.

That’s why Ambassify has created an intuitive, intention-based campaign builder with a vast library of campaign types s at your disposal, and we’re constantly testing and adding new ones. Get inspired by these campaigns to truly connect and interact — put an end to “social sharing fatigue,” and watch those social media shares multiply!