How to amplify your thought-leadership through employee advocacy

Many leaders spend countless hours creating the perfect brand for themselves, driving online conversations, and developing their networks, but often find themselves wondering - what would happen if my employees were as visible or engaged online as I am? What if every single member of my team was sharing, supporting, and advocating our company mission, values and content?

This is a great thing to be open to and something that we often hear from our clients. That’s why in today’s newsletter, I wanted to shift gears and explain a very new and important trend in digital marketing - Employee Advocacy.

Employee Advocacy

What is it?

Employee advocacy is, simply put, the promotion and championing of a company or organization by its employees through the use of specific content on various social platforms. They are your digital brand ambassadors spreading positive brand awareness on their own platforms. 

This is something that has taken off over the past few years due to the extreme reach of platforms like Linkedin and Twitter. Decision-makers are now turning to online presence more and more to inform their decisions and opinions. 

Why is it important?

 Often, corporations want to help their employees share more to spread knowledge about how they do things and their unique value propositions. This also helps immensely to encourage new employees to work there (employer branding - thus saving costs on HR and recruitment) and to promote their services and products without coming off too sales-y (positively impacting sales revenue).

To understand the scale of impact of employee advocacy and engagement, according to MSL Group, brand messages increased reach by 561% when shared by employees vs the same message being shared via official company social channels. 

Additionally, brand messages are shared 24x more when distributed by employees (MSL Group), rather than the brand itself, and collectively employees have social networks 10x that of a single corporate brand (LinkedIn). 

The problem, however, is that often companies don’t know exactly where to start.

Where to begin?

Here are some of our top tips:

 1. Create a social media guidelines checklist.

Before you help your employees create content, create a checklist so that you help them know exactly what is okay to share and what isn't.

Starbucks is absolutely great at this - here are some of their guidelines. 

Some that we often suggest to our clients include:

• Do make it your own - Be open about the fact that you’re a team member and not an official company spokesperson. Use statements in your account profile or posts like: “I’m a part of the Company team and these are my personal opinions....”
• Do tell the truth - Your voice can be powerful, so don’t spread false information, rumors, or misleading claims about the company, its services, or other partners. Get the facts to always be honest and accurate.
• Do remember: The internet doesn’t have a “delete” key – Anything you share on the internet can take on a life of its own and be hard to remove once it’s out there, so please think before you share something.
• Don’t use other people’s stuff - Just because something is online doesn’t mean it’s OK to copy it (like an image, statement, or anything else that’s specifically protected by copyright laws).
• Don’t give out personal info about customers or other partners.
• Don’t distribute or share future promotional activities, trade secrets, internal reports, policies, procedures, or other private and confidential info. 

2. Create a ready-made plan

Doing the work when you can makes it easier for your busy employees. One of the things we recommend is pre-made content calendars where employees can download the images and choose from 1-2 caption options (as well as a “make it your own” option).

You can divide content by different themes, for example, holidays, promos, top industry tips, and whatever else you think would be best for your industry.

 Here are few examples of post images that can be included in your content bank:

Google Drive or other cloud tools are great for storing these types of calendars.

 3. Evaluate what is working and what is not

Sometimes, employees will understand exactly what to do and be on board quickly. Other times, they may not understand best practices or that they can use a scheduler to make posting easier for them.

After the first 60 days, re-evaluate how the posting is going. If it is going well, continue to improve the content you are providing them with by adding more of the top categories. If not, you may want to consider scheduling a short seminar to discuss best practices, hear their feedback and concerns, and answer any pending questions they may have.

 4. Repeat and continue

Employee advocacy is just like any other type of digital marketing - it is important to stay ahead of the trends and include new media forms whenever relevant (like video or audio, for example).

Continue to optimize your calendars and incorporate new styles - you may want to plan in advance so that you have an eye on what is coming up next and where you can innovate.

Next steps?

We hope these tips help you start a great employee advocacy plan so that your employees can be just as visible as you are with your thought-leadership profiles.

We hope these tips help you start a great employee advocacy plan so that your employees can be just as visible as you are with your thought-leadership profiles.

If you have any questions or would like our help setting up your own employee advocacy strategy, write me a message and my team will respond with a questionnaire to see if we can help.