Olivier Choron
Have you given employee advocacy much thought? I’ll start by explaining what it is… Employee advocacy is the promotion of a brand through its employees. But the question is, how can this work for your brand? Here let me show you.
Why involve employees?
With two thirds of consumers buying decisions occurring digitally before they even interact with your brand; it becomes crucially important that you have a strong online presence. And what better way to promote your brand than through your employees’ social media accounts?
Whether you are a small or large organisation, your employees will certainly have a social media presence, with a mix of personal and professional connections. Think about how much further your message could reach, just by utilising them. And let’s not also forget that the message will be shared by the connections their followers trust, strengthening the promotional effectiveness.
Many of our customers use employee advocacy to increase their potential reach, and I cannot begin to tell you how happy they are with the outcome. One of our customers went from reaching a few hundreds of connections (Twitter followers, Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts), to 170,000 connections, just by allowing 160 employees to share their content.
Compete
Through increasing your potential reach, this undoubtedly will increase your competitiveness. Ensure you are at the forefront of potential customer’s minds when they decide to make the all-important decision to buy your product over competitors.
Create passion
Employee advocacy is also a great way to create a motivated workforce, who are equipped with an in-depth knowledge of their brands offerings. Also to their connections they appear as a professional, sharing their knowledge to others.
Thought-leadership
These posts also allow your employees to become thought leaders and trusted advisors in the social media world. They are providing value to their online community. To become a thought leader, all employees have to do is add their opinion to your post. It will provide a personal touch, whilst allowing them to appear up-to-date with the industry they work in.
Dedicated workforce
Your posts will create additional value to employees through improving their online professional status. This creates a real benefit to employees, which potentially increases their dedication to your brand. In return they will get more out of their place of work.
How to achieve this?
But the big question is how to achieve employee advocacy effectively. The good news is, there are social media platforms that allow brands to create, schedule and send posts to your employees. All employees then have to do is either click one button to share the content onto their desired social network, or create a personal thought leader comment and then click share. It’s that simple.
How can I get my employees to share my posts?
I will only briefly explain this part, as I am going to do another blog post on gamification next week, but to encourage all employees to share your posts, you may need to incentivise them. Some examples include:
- Rewards for sharing your posts
- Competitions amongst employees
- Publicising the level of activity the highest performers have generated
- Making the task feel like a game
So there are real benefits to employee advocacy, something all brands should get involved in. Many of our customers use socialondemand for employee advocacy, and this has really helped increase their potential reach. Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself.
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