How to Combat Social Sharing Fatigue and Social Media Burnout

What is social sharing fatigue and how to recognize it

If you’ve implemented advocacy in your company, it means that your content plan will (or at least should) try to involve your employees in one way or another. There is a fine line between not asking for interested engagement and forcing people to share too much content. Going overboard with the latter can be a real fatal move.

Companies that constantly try to push out content to their employees risk taking social selling and general social sharing too far for their ambassadors. Even within our pool of customers and end-users, we’ve noticed that some struggle way more than others to get their engagement and advocacy initiatives off the ground.

Not only were their employees not sharing company content, but after a while, they weren’t even accessing it on the platform or opening new content notification emails.

This can often make employees feel like they are only a means to an end — a tool for social media exposure rather than a trusted spokesperson for the company.

What was our diagnosis? You guessed it, social sharing fatigue. Naturally, as soon as employees start feeling like they’re being used as money-making machines, companies see a drastic decline in overall content engagement, which in turn defeats all the connected goals — mostly fewer social media shares and significantly less reach.

How to encourage activation and engagement

Fear not, though; this is not an inescapable trap. And to prove to you there’s a way to reach that balance between output and input requests, 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 to collaborate with employees. Ask people what they want to share on social media and what kind of perks and rewards they’d like to get for it, involve them in company-wide topics, and give them a voice. Advocacy is not a one-way street, and if you’re hoping for a successful experience, then it’s crucial that you build a collaborative relationship with your employees. It’s a process, it’s a journey, and the efforts must come from both directions. Intention and dedication must come from both parties.
  
  
• Make sure you act on the feedback you collect. It’s not enough to just ask for people’s opinions if you’re not going to do anything about it. 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. Especially with younger generations (think about Gen Z), it’s important to make sure they realize they are part of a puzzle and have a bigger-than-imagined role to play in being an advocate for their company. They have to know and understand that their actions, opinions, and efforts matter.
  
  
• Install a recognition and reward program. Recognition programs are fundamentally about two things: putting employees in the spotlight and showing appreciation for their efforts. Putting your employees at the center of the stage and celebrating them for this or that achievement can truly make a difference in the atmosphere and vibe within the company. 
  
  
• Turn the spotlight on your employees. Recognizing the ambassador of the month and campaigns where you interview new hires and more seasoned colleagues are good ways to enhance engagement, make people feel included, and create internal bonds and stronger relationships. 
  
  
• Ask for content submissions and start co-creating content. This doesn’t even have to be user-generated content, it can simply be original content, posts, or articles your employees have stumbled upon online and have enjoyed reading or learned from. As long as they’re industry-specific, they show openness and interest in your employees’ lives and ideas, avoiding a certain narrowmindedness that insinuates that knowledge resides only within the company.
  
  
• 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. Advocacy is a give and take and it’s important to show that you value their opinion beyond social sharing.

Preventing social media burnout

Social media burnout happens when you and your social media team run out of ideas and are left with second-class content or, even worse, no content at all. This is a very extreme situation, that’s true, but you should pay attention to the frequency of your content output in relation to the amount of content you have on your hands. 

How can you prevent this from happening? Well, first of all, we have a content creation guide series collecting a range of tips and best practices to not only avoid that but also to have a vast library of content at your disposal — from brainstorming to keeping a content calendar to planning content creation and output and repurposing old content. Keeping those guidelines in mind should ensure you stay out of the woods. 

Other than that, a good starting point is meeting on a regular basis with your social media or creative team to think out loud, let the ideas and the creativity flow, and come up with new content.

If you plan and schedule your posts, your recurring series, and the general content push-out well in advance, you’ll solve two problems. One, you’ll make sure to have a steady and plump content plan with good distribution and variation in content; two, it will allow you to visually see how long the content will last and act accordingly.

Make sure that you’re not becoming predictable – social media are all about experimentation and innovation, about doing things differently. To avoid that, get back together with your social media or creative team, prepare a big pot of coffee, and let your creative juices flow freely to find new ways to do what you’re already doing.