Employee advocacy - do you need it?

Let’s imagine ourselves a situation from everyday life - an average guy looking for work and an equally average woman looking for a new car. One is being bombarded with commercials about great, developing and challenging jobs, whereas the other scrolls through dozens of available cars, all in different shapes, sizes and colours, not mentioning technical details. Now, when they finally create their small group of final contestants, they start looking deeper into the matter - our guy is carefully studying websites of the company he considers joining and our lady is comparing all the little details that may matter once behind the wheel. The thing is - there is only so much information they can find on the Internet. So, they both decide to head to the people that have a valuable insight into the matter - employees of the potential workplace of our buddy or car retailers and manufacturers connected to the car brand our gal considers buying. And in both cases, be it a search for a particular job or simply for our new car, people get involved in something we could call employee advocacy.

All right, all right, story time is over - what does employee advocacy actually mean? To keep it simple, it's the idea of your employees advocating for your brand/product/company on their own in social media. Now before you ask, "why do I need it?", here are some figures [1]:

• around 3.4 billion people in the world are considered active social media users;
• 3.2 billion people access social medial on mobile devices;
• 90% of social medial users reach out to brands or retailers.

So, you see, those are not small numbers we're talking about. Social media are (and have been for a while already!) quite a thing and the sooner you engage your employees in the fight for your customer, the better.

What about those precious commercials I paid for? …A-and what about that celebrity that's been posting photos of my products for an entire month?!

Yeeeaaah, that can only get you so far. Let us make a test - pick up your phone/tablet/PC/whatever and take a look at your Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/you name it. Now you can clearly see that there is an ABUNDANCE of professional commercials from all brands, ranging from toothbrushes to cars and space flights. People no longer care, a commercial is just an obstacle to be passed by. When they notice a post of their friend or just simply a genuine person - now that is eye-catching. An authentic post from your employee will be a great commercial for your brand - after all, if they recommend it then it has to be good, right?

How do I do it?

Employee advocacy needs two things to work - a platform and a will. Now with platforms, it's quite easy - your employees are mostly already on a number of social media and they are quite skilled at using them. It would be wise to prepare some materials to read or share in order to make things easier but remember - those are their private social media profiles! You don't want to be sued for harassment because you approached employee advocacy with zealous fire in your eyes and you controlled every word your employees wrote on their own profiles, right? You don't want to look like those guys! ??

            Let your employees grow creative and you will clearly see the results!

Now, the other thing is convincing your employees to help you. There are many ways you can encourage your employees to participate in employee advocacy. First and foremost, you should make sure that they are satisfied with their work conditions, their team and their tasks and development possibilities. Of course, you can use many other positive incentives to encourage them - show them that there's something in it for them as well, since in fact there is. It will help them grow their networks and create meaningful relationships that may come to fruitions in the future.

Wrapping up, I am not willing to leave you empty-handed… here's a handful of nice facts about effects of employee advocacy[2]:

• 1000 employees involved in employee advocacy can generate around $1,900,000 in advertising value;
• 33% of people trust a recommendation from a brand commercial, while a whooping 90% trust a recommendation from connections;
• Content shared by employees gets 8 times more reactions (likes, comments etc.) than content shared by an official brand profile;
• Employees have on average 10 times more followers than their official brand profiles - talk about reach, huh?

So? Encouraged?

Sources:

[1] https://blog.statusbrew.com/social-media-statistics-2019/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160503014941/http:/blog.kredible.com:80/employee-advocacy-statistics-2016