The success of your employee advocacy program is heavily dependent on the participation of your Members. Members tend to share content they like, that resonates with them, and that they think their audience will like. They also might be okay with sharing on some networks and not others, so you as the Gaggle Manager need to understand how the Activities you give your Members resonate both with them and how it impacts your overall content strategy.
Let’s take a closer look at how the Content Strategy report can help you see the true impact of your employee advocacy efforts.
Accessing Your Content Strategy Report
From your Manager dashboard, select ‘Reports,’ then ‘Content Strategy.’
The contents of this report will help you evaluate the content being shared by your Members. It can also help you shape your future by identifying share rates of the Activities you create by network and specific Activity types so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Using the Date Filter
Before you do anything else with this report, you’ll first want to review your date filters.
By clicking on the box for the date filter, you’ll be met with some preset options: past, current, and next. Using the ‘Past’ filter, you can adjust the exact number of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, or years you want to include. By selecting the three dots next to the duration filter, you can also indicate a ‘start from’ date or ask the data to ‘include today.’
Toggling to the ‘Current’ filter will allow you to indicate pre-set timeframes like ‘this week’ or ‘this quarter.’ Finally, there is a ‘Next’ filter, which cannot be used in this view. Since this reports on events that have already happened, selecting ‘next’ would leverage the future. As much fun as that would be, it’s not going to be practical so, it will return zero results.
As you make changes to your filter settings, you’ll notice the contents of the data on the page also update.
Analyzing Your Content Strategy and Share Rate by Social Network
Your content strategy is made up of two primary components: the Activities the Gaggle Manager creates for the Members to share and the Activities the Member chooses to execute. When these are aligned, employee advocacy programs take off. When these are not aligned, then you may need to reconsider your approach.
Content Strategy by Network
The content strategy by the network is a graphical representation of the Activities a Gaggle Manager has created for Members to complete. This example clearly favors LinkedIn and Twitter for the new Activity creation, meaning Members have access to LinkedIn and Twitter Activities but rarely to say an Instagram activity.
Why does this matter? By itself, the report tells you if your employee advocacy strategy is aligned with your overall social media strategy. For example, say you post a lot of content directly to Instagram and your social media metrics show this might be a good social channel for you. You presently have little to no Instagram Activities for your Gaggle and it may be worth experimenting with creating Activities on this network.
Likewise, in conjunction with the next report, it will validate if your employees are okay with sharing on that social channel.
Activities Completed by Network
The activities by the network tell a deeper story. Having Activities created is great, but executing them is even better. This graph tells you of the available Activities, and what was executed.
As a Gaggle Manager, when an Activity is created, it is created once but the number of people who can share it would be determined by your audience size:
- Did you share it with all Members?
- Did you share it with a specific Channel?
- Did you share it with a specific Group?
So, one Activity could be served to 100 Members in your program. If all Members perform that Activity, the Activities Completed by Network report will indicate it was completed 100 times.
Why does this matter? First and foremost, it ensures that you are delivering your Members content they actually want to share on the networks they care about.
Using our prior Instagram example, you might serve a single Activity to 100 Members, but see only 5% of people complete the Activity. Then, you might share a similar message as the Instagram Activity to the same 100 Members but for LinkedIn, and see your completion rate jump to 40%.
It would be fair to say your Members may not be willing to share content to their Instagram network, which is often viewed as a more personal network, but are okay with LinkedIn Activities, which are often viewed as business-oriented.
It will also help you level-set your expectations. A Gaggle Manager might be under the perception that all Members are participating in every opportunity to share content. The Activities Completed by Network report can validate if this assumption is correct or not. When monitored over time, it can also help you identify trends on when Activities are most and least likely to be completed.
Analyzing Your Content Strategy and Share Rate by Activity Type
Activities Completed by Activity Type
Now that you understand what social network has the most Activities being created, it’s a good idea to understand what Activity types are available for your Members to complete.
By itself, it can also help you explain metrics found on your Gaggle Performance Report. For example, if you are heavy on LinkedIn Re-Share activities, it by nature does not contain a clickable link which we can track in your Gaggle metrics, so it will not report ‘clicks’ to that report.
Activities Completed by Activity Type
Like the social network report, the activities completed by activity type report can help you understand the willingness around completing a specific activity type.
One of the common deviations we often see here is based on the amount of effort it takes a Member to complete an activity. For example, Retweeting a Tweet and Reacting on LinkedIn are one-click Activities that take very little time from the Member and, generally, have a higher completion rate.
Likewise, if you serve a high number of LinkedIn Comment Activities, you might see a lower completion rate, simply because it takes more time and effort to complete the activity.
Why does this matter? Having a mix of different activity types is good because they bring different benefits to your program. Some help you increase your reach and awareness, while others help build relationships and increase engagement.
The maturation of your program matters, too. We often advise during implementation to create low-friction, high-reward Activities like reacting on content or re-sharing a post. This builds a muscle with employees and helps them see the benefits faster than more in-depth Activity types.
Ultimately the Content Strategy report helps you better understand the content you are creating, your team's willingness to complete the Activities, and how both impact your program.