Employee advocacy is a pretty simple concept – you get your employees on social media and allow them to share brand-related content in order to boost your brand’s voice. To keep the sharing consistent, you have to keep track of each employee’s sharing and progress- this can be an arduous task. This is why tools are preferred over manual tracking. Tools aren’t the only thing that’s important for a successful employee advocacy program, you also need to understand and connect with your employees.
The Power of Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy can be a powerful technique to bring attention to your company. A recent study shows that there is a whopping %561 increase in reach when using employee advocacy. The amount of visibility brands generate on their official social channels is also 10x more efficient through employee advocacy. Customers are more likely to trust their friends compared to companies/brands. This works in your favor to boost the bottom line – companies with active CEOs are 77% more likely to sell their products. Moreover, it gives your employees and customers the opportunity to interact with each other. Establishing a good employee advocacy program will exponentially increase the effectiveness of a company’s social media campaign.
How To Build A Successful Employee Advocacy Program
1. Set your goals: Set specific goals for what you want to achieve with employee advocacy.
2. Keep your brand’s identity consistent: It’s important to ensure that your employees’ brand shares follow a certain tone that you set. Decide and reinforce how you want them to represent the company.
3. Trust your employees: The more you trust your employees, the more likely they are to participate and engage
4. Teach them how to share: Teach them what they can and cannot share on social media. Don’t send them out blind.
5. Provide content to share: Give your employees safe content to share. This will help eliminate uncertainty about what they need to share.
6. Invest in a employee advocacy platform: To make sharing and interaction easy for your employees, invest in a platform.
7. Measure results: Measure the impact and success of your program. This helps you grow and come up with better strategies.
8. Make it fun: Keep your employees motivated with fun incentives. Make the program fun for everyone so they keep going.
No matter how big or small your company is, your employees are it’s representatives. They know the ins and outs of your company and are the best people to spread your message.
Tools To Use
LinkedIn Elevate
LinkedIn’s Elevate is a built-in employee advocacy system that lets you and your employees share curated content across the social platform. LinkedIn Elevate provides relevant content through it’s new feeds – Pulse and Newsle – that you can share on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can schedule content to be shared later. Since LinkedIn is a professional site, Elevate gives you the advantage of directly influencing customers and potential partners. You can also directly correlate your marketing efforts and the number of views your company profile has.
DrumUp Employee Advocacy
DrumUp Employee Advocacy is a minimalistic and intuitive tool that makes employee advocacy a breeze. The admin of an employee advocacy account on DrumUp can share custom or curated posts on the company’s stream, and give employees easy access to it. The app also shares daily newsletters with employees to keep your employees up to date.
To encourage employees to stay motivated and share constantly, the app has a leaderboard where users get points for sharing and interactions. To keep track of your efforts, you can use the analytics tool to see each employee’s activities and see what type of content performs best.
DrumUp is also a social media management tool that works well with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning based algorithms help curate great content based on your niche and keywords. This makes it easy to track content from peers in your industry.
Brand Amper
Brand Amper has a unique approach to employee advocacy – it collects employees’ professional stories and turns them into assets. The app works with 1 major principle – Transparency. Brand Amper is the perfect tool for employee generated content. It helps employees tell honest stories about their brand and emphasizes how a strong employee can reflect on the company. By using this platform, both employees and companies can improve their professional image. This is great for recruitment marketing as the stories can be used to highlight what’s true about a company.
Dynamic Signal
Dynamic Signal is a platform that mainly focuses on employees. Their tool, VoiceStorm, make employee advocacy much easier with it’s news feed that showcases the most current news about a company. Each employee gets a customized news feed based on their position, role and seniority at the company. They can then share relevant content with ease. The platform also allows for real time messaging making internal communications easier. The platform is built for the and encourages engagement and participation through surveys, quizzes, and other fun, interactive activities. You can also send personalized invitations where employees can add their own thoughts to event invites. The tool provides analytics and lets you integrate with a bunch of other tools.
All in all, these 4 tools are great for employee advocacy. They help you understand and work with your team members without too much of a hassle. Employee advocacy can reap huge benefits when done right and more companies are understanding this. A good advocacy program might take a while to setup but it’ll be worth the investment.
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