How you can use employee advocacy on social media to boost your brand

Whether you are just starting out or you're a fully-fledged industry expert, everyone needs people who promote their brand, their culture and their products or services.

For most businesses their first port of call is external sources of praise – happy customers – bypassing valuable internal assets like employees.

Although external brand praise is a great source of impartial feedback it can be time-consuming to collect and often sporadic in nature. Having a regular flow of brand advocacy will ensure your message is getting spread far and wide, often. Employee advocates are people who actively promote the company they work for and its culture. It’s a great source of regular praise and content, and there’s a variety of ways it can be implemented with a number of benefits for you and your employees.

Social media reach

Your business already has active social media accounts regularly sharing useful and relevant content, funny pictures, videos and more. So, the first step is to encourage your employees to like and share your business pages and posts to their personal accounts. It's not uncommon for employees collectively to have social networks ten times larger than a single organisation so why not try and capitalise on that?

These extended networks offer your business reach and exposure far beyond just posting to your business page. People who might not have seen your posts or know who you are, are now seeing them because they know your employees - your mutual friends. It's also been noted that click-through-rates of posts shared by employees are much higher than posts shared by the business alone. This is due to increased authenticity as people trust content and recommendations from people they know.

Strengthening brand values through personal accounts

Another way of increasing your reach is to encourage employees to share to their own personal social media accounts while tagging your business. This personal content can create a more powerful and authentic message and the perfect way to demonstrate brand values without it appearing forced or regimented.

Encourage them to pick favourite products, make recommendations or capture office fun and get sharing with their personal network.

Sales

Content created and shared by your employees can be a great tool for attracting new leads and making sales. Employee advocate content gives your sales teams the option to offer prospects new ways to connect with your company that isn’t just following the main company page. This will build the relationship over time whilst showing off your employees. Having real people praise the company improves brand trust, in turn improving sales figures.

Display your expertise

In addition to content distribution, employees can be a great source of content creation too. Employee-generated content cuts down the amount of time your marketing team needs to spend creating new content, whilst giving employees the opportunity to display their expertise, and give insight into their job roles.

Encouraging employee advocacy is important when creating a successful company, as well as being a great way to boost employee motivation and happiness. If your employees feel valued they will be more likely to recommend your business as a great place to work with great products or services available.

If you would like help building out your social media plan, get in touch here.