Time to think about Employee Advocacy 2.0

Employee advocacy is when the employees of your company take steps to promote their employer through online social media platforms. Its been a big topic of importance in recent years, in particular given the rise of social media and the never-ending challenges with recruiting and retaining top talent across all organizations.

Enter Social Media as the Employee Advocacy Enabler

Social Media has taken off in a way to become an alternate reality of our lives. We literally post and engage with content all the time now. We the people are what makes Social Media work. 

And people are what enable businesses to grow. 

Advocacy started along the same way. Brand marketers seek to have control over how content is shared, and this led to stringent social media policies which in a way made employees scared to share content created by the marketing team. 

While control is not such a bad thing. What happens when you decide to clamp down, people start backing off corporate and brand content even though it’s not stated in the policy. Therefore, people decide not to talk about their own brands.

The real deal is how to get your employees to organise, manage, engage and share brand content… among other things.

For companies, this means having a tech platform to help them organise their content marketing and then give access to their employees. This is where platforms like Socxo came into play.

Addressing “what’s in it for me”:

Today everyone can and wants to become famous (well almost.) The real drift of why this is important from an employee context becomes clear when we see companies asking for candidate Linkedin Profiles along with Resumes. This shows how important one’s personal profile has become. While the Linkedin Profile shows professional validation, employers also check for social presence to know more about the person’s personality.

You can’t hide and become successful in your career. Therefore thinking about personal branding and doing something about it in a constructive manner goes a long way to building your reputation on social. 

Power-up Recognition, and the Personal brand. What better place to come from than their own company? This builds employee trust and bonding.

In comes the need to have a platform which helps you create an administrative feed which you can use to further distil and push specific, segmented and relevant content to your employees. Which in turn, is designed with the objective of making them look great on social media. It’s like helping your folks find their voices. And this is the crux of developing an employee-employer relationship beyond just the paycheck. This is where the Employee Advocacy 2.0 thinking comes in.

This is a good feeling designed to motivate employees to share while adding value.

So, here’s a mix for you to think about. Hopefully, this will make your Employee Advocacy Program stand out and help you build engagement and participation.