Insight September 9, 2020
When someone advocates for your brand or business, they extend the reach of your message by sharing it with their network. With employee advocacy, employees are the ones doing the advocating.
Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its workforce. This could mean that employees share information about specific products or campaigns. Or, it can mean that employees share the company culture online. This can help boost brand reputation and make recruitment easier.
Employee advocacy can take many forms, from community networking and word of mouth to sharing company content on social media. The most common channel of employee advocacy is social media. Your employees already have social media profiles. They may even be on some platforms where your brand doesn’t have a presence. And they definitely have followers whom you don’t. In fact, LinkedIn found that the employees of a company tend to have 10 times more followers than the company itself. Plus, they may already be sharing business content on their personal channels – especially if they’re passionate about their work or like to share news about their colleagues’ promotions and achievements.
When employee advocacy is done right, it’s not just the company that benefits – employees get something out of it, too. They can both enhance their credibility and position themselves as industry experts.
There are many reasons why employers struggle to get their employees to engage with their company social media accounts. One of the most common reasons for lack of engagement is that employees view social media as their personal space – they enjoy keeping personal accounts separate from work. Yet, there are numerous ways to encourage authentic employee advocacy. Below are a few with which we’ve experienced success.
Employee advocacy and engagement starts with a strong company culture. Employee engagement may sound like some corporate-speak buzzword, but it’s vital to your success. Simply put, employee engagement is the level of commitment and passion your employees have for both your company and the work they do every day. At inferno, our mission statement fuels our team forward every day. It’s a collective message every employee can get behind and use in their day-to-day work.
“To passionately dedicate ourselves to the success of our clients, who empower us to make a difference.”
Additionally, in everything we do, from helping clients succeed to serving our community, we strive to follow our four core values:
Having core values not only gives current employees guiding principles for how they should do business and treat one another, but it also shows prospective employees what your workplace culture is like and tells them what to expect when they show up for an interview.
Some of the most engaging social media posts are the ones that share an organic look behind the scenes. And this is the content your workforce is most likely to re-share. Job seekers say current employees are the most trusted source of information about a company. They also rank social and professional networks as the most important resources in their job search. A few ways you can motivate your workforce to engage with your content include:
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for employee advocacy and engagement, but there’s a wide range of options you can consider to get your employees more involved. Contact inferno to discuss creating an employee engagement strategy that effectively promotes your business, improves employee retention, and welcomes new employees and clients.