Active employees represent a golden way for the company to create meaningful marketing. In this article, you will learn how your employees and how to work with employee advocacy can be beneficial.
It is not just the companies that experience benefits by working with employee advocacy. It can also be beneficial for the employees to be active on LinkedIn and thereby strength their personal-brand.
New ways are (perhaps) necessary
Research shows that 52% have more confidence in an employee than a CEO, and employees have 10 times more 1st-connections than a Company Page has followers in total.
If only 3% of your employees share content from the company, they can generate 30% of the impressions and clicks on that particular content. That is worth including when you think about the algorithms on the various social media.
Besides, customers largely ignore content that includes advertising, and ordinary sponsored posts can have the opposite effect.
Content marketing and HR
If these two disciplines are to be combined, one of the main elements is good content – so good that the employees want to share it and convey it in their own words. Therefore, such efforts require collaboration with other departments.
And it is not just marketing that should be producing content. There might be an employee with a passion in a particular area who can convey it. There is definitely an opportunity to ask for help from dedicated employees who can produce content themselves – but it should be an offer, not a requirement.
Before the employees can get started, there are first and foremost some guidelines that the employees need to know. These are described below.
Set clear goals and start strong
What would you like to achieve with your posts? Would you like to create brand awareness, increased sales or maybe hire new people? The important thing is that the purpose of your posts is clear and you are working towards these goals.
It is important that several interested people, who want to participate in the project, are selected. It must voluntary – otherwise, it won’t work.
Tell them about the benefits they can achieve:
- Build their personal brand
- Positioning themselves as a “visible expert” in the areas in which they have knowledge
- Get new followers and connections
By building success stories with employee advocacy and sharing it with the other employees, new candidates can be attracted. In this way, the company and its employees can obtain the exposure that otherwise would not be possible.
Develop a policy
When your employees are about to start sharing content on social media, it is a good idea to have a solid SoMe policy that sets up guidelines. Guidelines such as sharing and how an organization and its employees should behave online. The policy is there to protect your company’s reputation and encourage employees to share the company’s messages responsibly. A SoMe policy:
- Secures you against legal and security risks
- Creates consistency across your channels
- Allows employees to share with peace in mind
It is important, that your employees know about the document, which should be introduced when “joining” the employee advocacy program. Find a complete guide on how to make a SoMe policy here.
Teach them how to
Besides having a SoMe-policy, it is a good idea to host a workshop, where the employees can learn the basics. In this way, you ensure your company against unwanted posts and create the best starting point for the employees when sharing.
Remind them
Sharing regularly may not be as easy as it sounds. Therefore, it might be a good idea, in addition to holding workshops, to host small “status meetings” on how things are working out. In this way, you can keep the employees on track, support them and the employees can share their experiences – both good and bad.
Measure and inform
As with most other social media efforts, measurement is essential to improve performance. Measure the effect of employee sharing on behalf of your business. Demonstrate the increased reach that the company (probably) has achieved. Keep your employees motivated by showing how their posts have benefited them with eg. more relevant connections, recognition and more. You can thus create a collaboration with your colleagues across HR and marketing to optimize the overall effort.
So, if you work with marketing, you might want to get some good friends in HR, and vice versa if you’re in HR, then maybe you should start thinking about how marketing can help your department reach the best talents.
The article is written with inspiration from this and this article.