How to Empower Your Employee Influencers?

Who is an Employee Influencer?

Employee influencers are the employees that you have selected and trained to participate in engaging your clients and consumers.

Social media influencers can be selected, onboarded, and leveraged for marketing, but they aren’t the ones driving the trend today. All of the requirements that your brand seeks for influencer marketing are already vested in your own employees:

• They know about the product in great detail – what inspired its creation, how it was designed, how it evolved, what it can do for the customers, and why it matters to the company.
• They are considered a highly vetted, trustworthy source of information because they are engaged with the very brand that created the product. Customers won’t let this go unnoticed.
• Employees already embody the brand voice and culture in everything they do for it. It shows in the messages they send to their clients and customers.

If you look at a report by?Weber Shandwick, you will realize how effective employee influencers can be in addressing relevant audiences for marketing. 88% of your employees use social media daily, and 50% post messages about the brand on these platforms. If this social media presence and communication can be leveraged to establish a steady, robust marketing channel, your brand would then be in a position to improve its public image and standing drastically.

Employee influencers have an undeniable potential to solidify your brand in its niche by bringing you more interested customers and fewer cold leads.

Why Cultivate Employee Influencers?

There is no doubt now that employees can be more effective at achieving better and more favourable results from influencer activities than social media influencers. This is further solidified as a fact by the Edelman Trust Barometer.?Edelman?found that employees were the most trusted and credible spokespeople for addressing customer issues; they commanded a whopping 48% favour.

Moving forward from this point, leveraging employees to become the real influencers for your brand can help you gain consumer trust and better communicate your brand values to the world. Let’s now look at some advantages of cultivating employee influencers.

Types of Employee Influencers

If you go into the deeper details of your employees’ social networks, you will discover that quite a few of them – even more so at the senior positions – have a good base of followers on their social media accounts. Whether Twitter or LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, your employees are active on these platforms, have a good 1,000+ followers there who trust them, and can help your brand be seen and heard among these circles.

To identify your opportunities for addressing this crowd, you must categorize your employees into four distinct groups. This grouping helps you designate realistic employee influencer goals to each category that aligns with their social activity and following.

How can you leverage the employee influence online for your business? Check out this article to know what makes your employees so valuable, and key characteristics to help your organization identify your top employee influencers.