The Benefits of Employee Advocacy
- Better Employee Engagement. Today’s business reality is that disengaged employees are present in almost every organization. ...
- Increased Social Presence. Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today ).
- Humanize your brand. The research study reveals that employees have 10X more followers than brands’ social channels. Precisely, your employees have a great marketing potential to amplify your branded content.
- Foster Thought Leadership. Empowering and encouraging your employee brand advocates through an effective employee advocacy program reveals them that you are investing in their personal and professional development.
What is employee advocacy and why does it matter?
Oftentimes, when people think about brand advocates, they may think of external people, such as social media influencers. While this may be true, consider this: your employees know your company inside out and can lend a unique voice to your brand’s reputation. Employee advocacy has a lot of benefits for both the company and the employee.
What are the benefits of advocacy programs?
These programs offer benefits for both the brand and employee: brands enjoy increased awareness and controlled messaging while employees earn rewards and establish themselves as thought leaders in their field. Explore examples of successful advocacy programs in action, from AT&T to Boeing.
Should your company use social media for employee advocacy?
In a recent Edelman study of consumer trust, 63% of 18-34 year olds surveyed trust what influencers say about brands more than the brands themselves. When both your customers and your employees are already on social media, it makes sense to utilize this channel for advocacy. Both the company and employee win in the right employee advocacy scenario.
What is brand advocacy and how does it work?
Brand advocacy refers to someone (an employee, an influencer, or a customer) who shares a positive message about a product or a specific brand. The result of the message is word-of-mouth advertising about the brand to their network of followers on social media.
What is the benefit of employee advocacy?
Employee Advocates Increase Your Brand Engagement Only 3% of employees share company-relevant content, but they drive a 32% increase in engagement. Employees get two times higher CTRs from their shares, compared to company shares of the same content.
How does employee advocacy benefit an organization?
An organization benefits employee advocacy through increased reach and engagement. Customers are more comfortable engaging with someone whom they see as an expert with a product or service. And it's a no-brainer that your employees are the best people that represent your company.
What is an example of employee advocacy?
Examples of Employee Advocacy An employee image or information about an interesting project he/she is working on, and contact information is posted on the company website. Companies encourage their employees to tweet about the culture at work.
What does an employee advocate do?
The general purpose of employee advocacy is to motivate and make it easy for your employees to participate in your organization's marketing efforts through performing activities and sharing company messages with their personal social networks.
What is employee advocacy in HRM?
In simple terms, employee advocacy refers to the act of employees promoting the company through their own personal actions and through their own networks. This is often on social media. It is separate from paying employees to promote the organization (such as hiring a social media manager).
What is the most important aspect of employee advocate?
The most important factors for the success of the program are trust and autonomy. Without these, it is difficult to generate the results you want. You must provide liberty to your employees when it comes to social sharing. You need to trust them and let them share their ideas.
What is an employee advocacy program quizlet?
STUDY. What is an employee advocacy program? a social media plan for only employees to take advantage of.
Why is employee advocacy on social media important?
A recent study found that employee advocacy benefits companies in three key ways: It positively impacts sales due to increased brand awareness and favorable perceptions (“brand sentiment”). It improves staff recruitment, retention, and engagement. It aids in PR crises and issues management.
What is an employee advocacy platform?
Employee advocacy software enables companies to engage their workforce to share branded content and information via social channels. With these tools, brands are able to build pre-approved content libraries for their employees to access to share via mobile, email, or social media.
How do you advocate for employee promotion?
Focus on future growth regularly during check-ins with your manager. Whether it's a formal review or a weekly meeting, speak clearly about your desire to advance, the ways you are working on your professional skills and the ways a promotion can unleash more growth for your team, department or company as a whole.
How is employee advocacy measured?
The 7 Metrics You Need to Measure Your Employee Advocacy ProgramPercent of Employees Sharing Content. ... Percent of Employees Who Have Participated in the Past 90 Days. ... Which Content Is Being Shared the Most By Employees. ... Engagement Rates of Content Being Shared By Employees.More items...•
What is Employee Advocacy?
Employee advocacy can be defined as a company employee acting as a spokesperson (advocate) for their employer’s brand. This role can be taken on by...
Why Employee Advocacy is Important?
Employee Advocacy offers a number of benefits to a company, such as: Better Marketing Efforts Increased Sales Easier Time Attracting Great Candidat...
How to build an Employee Advocacy Program?
Choose to make workplace culture a priority. Decide on the goals for the employee advocacy plan. Let employees know about the plan. Set up an emplo...
What is Employee Advocacy?
In simple terms, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by the individuals who work for it.
7 Amazing Employee Advocacy Benefits
Social media has become a primary source of information for people researching a brand or business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are a great deal of employee advocacy benefits for those who implement an effective program.
Frequently Asked Questions
In simple terms, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by the individuals who work for it. Check out the full article for how employee advocacy works and why it is such a successful marketing method.
Why is it important to have an employee advocacy program?
The reason it’s important to attach a person to your employee advocacy program is to emphasize that advocacy is a part of your company and not a one-off gimmick. It also helps to personalize the experience.
What is an employee advocate?
An employee advocate is someone who: Generates positive exposure and raises awareness for a brand through digital media or offline channels. Recommends a company’s products or services to a friend or family member. Represents the best interests of the company both internally and externally.
Why do employee advocacy programs fail?
As we mentioned, one of the most common reasons employee advocacy programs fail is a lack of internal communication. Slack is a popular messaging system for businesses that allows teams to quickly communicate with each other in real time. Plus, you can create group “channels” so individual teams can group message each other.
Why is social media important for employee advocacy?
As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest benefits to using social media for employee advocacy is the ability to boost your organic reach. Monitor the reach you get through your content shared by advocacy, and compare it to your brand’s social reach. It’s also helpful to look at reach per network as well as combined.
What is employee retention?
For the most part, employee retention was all about compensation, benefits and general happiness within a specific role. Fast forward to today, and the story is much different. Company culture is a priority for both employees and employers. In fact, 80% of businesses plan to improve their corporate culture in 2017.
How many employees are engaged in 2016?
If your employees don’t feel engaged, it’s going to be difficult to get them to become genuine advocates. According to data from Aon Hewitt, only 24% of employees were highly engaged in 2016, and 39% are moderately engaged.
Is employee advocacy important?
But the reality is with the hiring market becoming increasingly competitive and changes to the way consumers shop, focusing on employee advocacy is more important than ever. In many ways, employee advocacy is like social media marketing.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is when the people who work for a company take steps to promote their employer. These promotional efforts generally take place on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
Why do you need an employee advocacy plan?
Since part of the reason for launching an employee advocacy plan is to boost sales, consider sharing the number of new sales generated by employees’ posts. These figures may give your employees encouragement to keep up their efforts and continue posting on the company’s behalf.
How to make employee advocacy fun?
Make employee advocacy fun: Those who do participate in the program should receive some type of reward.
How to create a successful employee program?
1. Choose to make workplace culture a priority for your business. Before you can begin any of the concrete steps to put a successful employee program in place, you need to ensure that your team members feel good about their jobs. This idea involves much more than ensuring that wages and benefits are competitive.
Why do employees need to know how to communicate when posting on social media?
Employees need to know how to communicate when posting on social media so that they make a good impression on behalf of the company. Make sure that everyone participating understands what type of language is considered appropriate.
What is brand advocacy?
Brand advocacy refers to someone (an employee, an influencer, or a customer) who shares a positive message about a product or a specific brand. The result of the message is word-of-mouth advertising about the brand to their network of followers on social media.
What happens if you don't know what the program is supposed to accomplish?
If you don’t know what the program is supposed to accomplish, then you won’t have any way to determine if it is meeting those (or even exceeding) those goals.
What is employee advocacy?
Put simply, employee advocacy is the promotion of a business by those who work in it. The end goal is to make it easy for your employees to take part in your business’s marketing efforts. This might include:
Who benefits from employee advocacy?
Everyone! Both businesses and employees benefit from employee advocacy. For businesses, it’s an opportunity to boost brand awareness and increase engagement across all social channels. This also includes generating new leads, traffic, shares and even discovering new potential hires.
Why employee advocacy is important for your employees
By encouraging your employees to become advocates of your business and engage with the promotion of your brand, you’ll both see a number of benefits. These include:
Why employee advocacy is crucial for your business
Many of the core benefits of employee advocacy for employees can be applied to your business. For example, it helps to enhance brand recognition and awareness, brings employees, managers and CEOs closer together and, of course, it drives more business and leads.
Maximising your employee advocacy
Choosing which route you go down to maximise employee advocacy is an individual business choice. There’s no “one best practice/strategy fits all” and there are a variety of engagement methods you can try before finding one that suits you and your employee’s.
Ways to increase employee advocacy
For both you and your employees to see the benefit of employee advocacy, you should create a specific programme. They need to understand the purpose and what’s in it for them. The more invested your employees are in the programme, the more successful it will be.
What about an employee advocacy plan?
Creating a strong employee advocacy programme is essential. Enabling your employees to constantly promote your business is a surefire way to gain exposure and increase brand awareness. But what makes a programme successful?
Do employees need to be careful with disclosure rules?
It’s true that employees do need to be careful with disclosure rules passed by the FTC, but disclosure from employees doesn’t take anything away from a true employee advocate if they’ve been built as an industry thought leader among their peers.
Is employee advocacy hard work?
It’s true that setting up an employee advocacy program is hard work, but always remember to keep the above benefits in mind while working on these advocacy efforts. Everything will pay off in the end.
Why is employee advocacy important?
Employee advocacy software can help you supply approved content to staff, communicate instructions and measure results.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is a relatively recent practice helping businesses expand their audiences and improve their bottom lines. Employee advocacy uses trends in business culture and social media to create strong public images and motivate team members. If you're interested in learning how to increase employee engagement and improve how the public perceives your organization, you might benefit from learning about employee advocacy. In this article, we review what employee advocacy is, why it's important, types of employee advocacy and how to begin an employee advocacy program of your own.
Why is social media important for employees?
Social media is a highly effective form of employee advocacy because it directly engages new audiences and allows your employees to use their own voices on your company's behalf. Typically, companies provide employees with general directions or guidelines for advocacy posts to ensure they represent the company as intended. Companies may choose to create competitions for most successful posts or set collective goals for their teams.
Can you offer rewards to employees?
Your company might decide to structure a rewards program, as part of social media initiatives or separately. You can offer bonuses, gift cards, or a paid day off to employees who successfully engage the public on the company's behalf or contribute ideas to your program. Aside from some time and energy, this might be the biggest expense in starting your employee advocacy program.
Better Employee Engagement
- Today’s business reality is that disengaged employees are present in almost every organization. So, HR leaders are beginning to engage employees innovatively using collaboration and advocacy tools and technologies in today’s digital workplace. In my opinion, employee advocacy and empl…
Increased Social Presence
- Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today). The ‘Always-on’ content helps you to increase your social engagement of your content and advocates. So, don’t underestimate the united power of employees’ content amplification in today’s modern marketing world. Unleash the power of empl…
Position Your Employees as Thought Leaders and Industry Domain Experts
- The onus lies with the business leaders to explain the advocacy goals to every employee brand advocates without fail. Precisely, communicate ‘What is in it for me (WIFME)‘ value proposition to your engaged and trusted employee brand advocates. This, in turn, builds a trust among employee brand advocates to advocate on behalf of your brand online. It is imperative for organizations to …
Humanize Your Brand
- The research study reveals that employees have 10X more followers than brands’ social channels. Precisely, your employees have a great marketing potential to amplify your branded content. If employees amplify your content across their social channels, it is a great way to humanize your brand. This, in turn, can help you generate more brand awareness, wider reach, qualified web visi…
Increased Brand Visibility, Improved Brand Recognition and Better Brand Loyalty
- Trust becomes essential in today’s business and people trust only family, friends and peers at the time of purchasing. Your employees have a great marketing potential to amplify always on content that increases brand awareness of your organization online. According to a recent survey by Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today, organizations with employee advocacy pro…
What Is Employee Advocacy?
7 Amazing Employee Advocacy Benefits
- 1: Larger Brand Presence and Social Media Reach
Social media has become a primary source of information for people researching a brand or business. Visibility on social media is a key aspect of any marketing campaign and using your employees’ social media presence will exponentially extend your brand’s organic reach. An impr… - 2: Greater Trust, Authenticity and a Humanized Brand
Increased reach and engagement are not the only employee advocacy benefits. When brand content is shared by peers, the people reached by that content see it connected to an authentic human being, rather than a nameless and faceless brand. Employees who deal directly with cust…
Conclusion
- In conclusion, there are a great deal of employee advocacy benefits for those who implement an effective program. These include improving your brand’s online presence, greater reach and engagement on social media, creating a stellar brand reputation, increasing employee engagement and productivity, recruitment and improved sales, conversions and re...
References and Resources
- Edelman: 2020 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study EveryoneSocial: The Benefits of Social Selling GaggleAMP: Employee Advocacy: What’s in it For the Employees? HubSpot: 71% More Likely to Purchase Based on Social Media Referrals [Infographic] LinkedIn: Making the Case for Employee Advocacy: A Pocket Guide MarketingProfs: Why Social Media Marketers and Brand M…