Despite the fact that nearly half of your workers use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, don’t be too eager to start posting your company’s benefits info on them.
The results of a new study suggest benefits and social media don’t mesh nearly as well as you might expect.
Employees saying ‘no’ to Facebook, Twitter posts
The majority of employees say they don’t want to receive benefits info from their employers via social-networking sites, according to the study, which was conducted by the National Business Group on Health and polled 1,500 full and part-time employees of large U.S. employers.
Specifically, the study found that:
- 80% of employees have no interest in receiving tweets about their healthcare benefits, and
- 75% of workers said they aren’t interested in receiving info about their employer-sponsored health benefits — nor tips about improving their health or saving money on their healthcare costs — via Facebook.
Why aren’t these social media sites effective vehicles for communicating benefits info? While 47% of full-time workers use Facebook (either daily or weekly) for personal reasons, just 7% say they use the site for business purposes.
Translation: Employees want to keep their personal lives separate from their professional lives online.
What you can do
Still think your workers would like access to your benefits info via a social network? No problem. The more access points employees have to reach your company’s benefits info the better.
Just don’t ditch traditional media — print mailings, workplace handouts, e-mail, etc.
