What is Employee Advocacy?
Is your marketing team stressing out to get recognized on social media and engage with your audience? Employee advocacy can help relieve them – all it takes is 5 minutes of your employees’ time. The concept is simple, your employees will share content on their social media and as a result, increase both their own and the company’s reach. Once they start getting used to it, they can increase the frequency at which they share and start engaging with audience members.
Employee advocacy can increase your brand’s reach by 10x on social media. This means that if you have 30 employees and they have 50 followers on 4 social media platforms your content will be viewed by 6000 more people. This is a steep improvement compared to only sharing through your brand’s channels.
3 Awesome Tools
Your employee advocacy program is completely dependent on the platform you choose. Different platforms have different features and all of them won’t work for you. Instead of choosing the tool with the most features, consider what will work best for your employees. Here are 3 tools you could consider:
- DrumUp – Employee Advocacy
DrumUp is a minimalistic employee advocacy platform that is very user friendly. On their dashboard, employees can get access to content curated by you. Sharing is made easy with their multiple scheduling facilities including one-click scheduling. The app also provides news and industry related content based on keywords you set, so your employees could improve knowledge and competency with the latest developments.You can schedule content days or weeks in advance. To keep employees motivated and participating, there is a leader board with points for sharing. You can use this for gamification and give incentives to top performers.
- LinkedIn Elevate
The world’s most popular networks for professionals has a cool platform for employee advocacy. It taps into it’s news feeds – Newsle and Pulse – to get the most relevant industry news. Employees can then share this content on LinkedIn and Twitter. Since it is an influential site, sharing will directly reach potential customers and influencers. The tool comes with powerful analytics that lets you observe the full funnel impact of your program. It’s features are quite extensive and definitely worth trying.
- Dynamic Signal – Voice Storm
Dynamic Signal’s employee advocacy platform, VoiceStorm, is a great employee engagement tool. Employees get varied content based on their roles, positions and seniority. They can share this content as they please. Internal announcements and communication in general, become easier as the tool allows for real-time messaging. It takes employee activities to a new level by allowing for quizzes, surveys and other fun, interactive activities. The tool also provides analytics to help track your progress.
How To Implement Employee Advocacy
For company leaders, implementing employee advocacy might seem like a hard task. Here is a step by step summary of how you can make your employees effective brand advocates:
- Make Your Case – Explain to your employees what employee advocacy is and how it works. Tell them about the benefits they will get (social proof, recognition and more contacts) along with the boost it gives for the company. Additionally, create incentives that you can offer to top performers.
- Set Goals – Set achievable, short term goals for your employees – this could be more traffic to your site, more sign-ups and leads or anything that is valuable to the company’s goals. To measure these goals, it is essential that all of your staff is using the same employee advocacy program with built-in analytics. This ensures you can keep track of who’s sharing and engaging the most.
- Training – Before your employees start with employee advocacy, train them on how different social media platforms work. Set rules for them and help them clear all their doubts. You can also set up a team of in-house workers who are familiar with social media, to help out less socially efficient employees. Encourage personalized sharing and train them on the do’s and dont’s.
- Start small – Don’t rush the setup of your program, start with a small group or department and track their performance. This will help you understand what is needed for the other employees and you can plan better for company wide implementation. The first group of employees from the pilot launch can then help out the beginners and act as mentors.
- Analyze – Track everything from who shares the most to the correlation it has on your leads and sales. Evaluate if your short term goals are being met and see if any changes are necessary. Ask your employees for feedback to understand if your process is working well internally.
Employee advocacy works well when paired with good content and even better work culture. Advocacy can increase your revenue by using your existing assets in different ways. Making these tools more accessible and less time consuming for your employees to share can only help your cause.
————–
Disha Dinesh is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration.
Twitter handle: Disha_Dee
https://www.facebook.com/godotmedia
https://www.linkedin.com/company/godot–media
