Employee Advocacy has become a bit of a buzz word in the industry, and when you look at some of the benefits this has on your business it’s no surprise! In brief employee advocacy is the exposure your company can get from staff and employees personally sharing your content on their own social channels. Want to know more? Here are a couple of the top benefits plus a few key points to help you get started in building your employee advocacy programme:
Benefits
Increased content exposure
If you work within the PR / marketing department you’ll know that one of the most important metrics you measure is Social Media reach / impressions and that with certain pesky algorithms *coughs* Facebook *coughs* it is becoming harder to increase your organic reach without having to pay for promoted posts or adverts. Now take a look at your employees – how many of them are active on Social Media? How many have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram etc.? How many connections do they each have on all of these profiles? And think about who they are connected to – they are often local, some are ex colleagues in the same industry, some are fellow students who studied the same subject as your employees did. So by your employees sharing your content on their own networks it not only dramatically increases content reach, but hopefully you will be reaching local and like-minded individuals who could be perfect for your upcoming vacancies.
Improved trust and loyalty
Here’s an example: You see an advert on Facebook for a new weight loss product with plenty of spiel and statistics about how brilliant it is, OR, you see a friend on Facebook sharing content about the same product with comments about how it has worked for them. You’re much more likely to trust your friend saying it works rather than the company who have a sales agenda behind their posts! It’s the same for employee advocacy! You can wax lyrical about how great working life is at your company but candidates will always buy into people more than marketing.
Want to get started? Here are our top tips to succeed in your Employee Advocacy Programme:
Sophie Heaton (Head of Employer Branding and Social Media)
