Employee Advocacy: Influencer Marketing Right Under Your Nose

Although all kinds of businesses are jumping on the brand influencer bandwagon, many are missing out on an opportunity right under their noses: employee advocates. When you use your employees to promote your brand, there is no need for social media marketing services from outside influencers. Instead, you use people who already know and care about your business. For this, all you need to do is start an employee advocacy program.

What Is an Employee Advocacy Program?

An employee advocacy program encourages workers to promote your business on social media. Promotion can range from posts that mention your company and shares of content to testimonials and blog posts. For employee advocacy to work, social media updates need to come across as genuine, must reflect your brand values, and should help your business move closer toward meeting its goals.

How to Turn Employees into Brand Advocates

Your employee advocacy program needs to be sustainable. This means making employees feel motivated but never forced — it is essential that they believe in what they are advocating. For this to happen, you’ll need to put a strategy in place. There are several things you should include:

-     Make it easy. It should be possible for employees to become brand advocates without a huge amount of time and effort. Provide employees with plenty of opportunities to share blog posts they find interesting and encourage them to simply like your social media content — it’s all beneficial for your brand.

-     Give employees freedom to express their views. Allow employees to create social media posts that reflect their unique insights. Just make sure that whatever they publish always fits with the brand image you want to create.

-     Share creative ideas. Listen to everyone’s ideas about brand advocacy. Hold meetings where employees can share their thoughts, hear news, and stay up to date on changes. This will also create opportunities for collaboration, which can be more motivating.

-     Participate in fun events. Plan events or join ones already happening. Use the opportunity to volunteer in your local community or raise money for charity. Employees can then share their own pictures of the event on social media.

-     Highlight your top employees. Create posts about the achievements of your employees or have an employee of the month to celebrate great work. These types of posts are sure to be shared.

Benefits for Employees

You can immediately get more employees on board by pointing out the benefits of becoming a brand advocate.

Personal Brand

Even short yet frequent social media posts enable employees to develop a personal brand. This sets them apart from others doing similar work.

Visibility

Posting content on the company blog allows employees to increase their visibility online. The content will appear whenever someone searches for their name, helping them to appear as experts in their field.

Career Opportunities

Demonstrating an in-depth understanding of topics that matter in your industry will help employees take their career to the next level. They are more likely to be chosen as mentors, receive a raise, and gain a promotion.

The more involved your employees are, the greater all of the above benefits.

Benefits for Your Business

There are just as many benefits of an employee advocacy program for your business. For instance:

-     Employees will feel more connected to your business, meaning they will be more supportive in helping the company grow.

-     You’ll receive greater social engagement.

-     Your blog will gain quality content that presents your business as an industry leader.

-     You’ll improve your brand visibility and image, showing a human side to your business.

Gamifying the Program

At Boostability, we chose to create employee brand advocates by gamifying our advocacy program. It works like this:

1.      Employees sign up to become part of the advocacy program, providing their Twitter handle, Facebook name, and Instagram name.

2.      We ask them to start following and interacting with a number of Boostability accounts.

3.      For each action they take, they receive a set number of points. For instance, commenting on Facebook gets you 10 points; sharing a photo gets you 20 points. Plus, employees receive another 20 points for each reshare.

4.      Every month, there are new challenges to win even more points and the chance to win prizes.

The program has been a huge success — we receive 30,000 individual shares per year from employees and more than 15 million impressions. This has led to an increase of more than 97,000 social media followers over four years through organic efforts alone. It has also improved employee morale, culture, training, and hiring.

However you choose to create your employee advocacy program, make sure that it is enjoyable for employees and beneficial for your bottom line. Measure the impact of the program by looking at how engagement on social media changes and talk to your employees for feedback and ideas on how you can continue to improve.