In general, we love to shout about the brands we love. Customers are more than five times more likely to discuss a positive experience with a brand than they are a negative one, and let’s not forget that social proof – the crème de la crème of marketing – is driven solely by our positive experiences with brands, and the inherent power that positivity has to get us talking, writing, shouting, and singing about our favorite businesses.
It’s not hard to see why. Passion, enthusiasm, engagement, and excitement are all extremely motivating emotions – and there’s a double payoff. Motivated and engaged customers have a habit of rubbing off on others. If we see someone going out of their way to brag about a brand, it’s only natural that we want to be able to brag about them too.
We love talking about loyal and engaged customers, but what about loyal and engaged employees? They hold an incredibly high value for businesses, provided you understand how to showcase their enthusiasm in a way that feels authentic and done for the right reasons: by driving advocacy on social media.
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Why Turn Your Employees into Advocates?
It’s about representation – putting a human face to your business. The power of social proof stems from the fact that people trust other people’s opinions more than they tend to trust faceless business entities, and that can easily extend beyond the social proof your loyal customers offer – all the way to your employees.
A business can’t fake an engaged and enthusiastic workforce. True, it can deploy all the happy-looking stock imagery it wants on its homepage and social media (although it’s certainly not the best way to capture interest), but there’s no easy substitute for employees who are willing to put themselves out there as representatives for the business they work for. Employee engagement is about more than productivity, after all.
Employee advocacy is proof that you’re doing right by your employees, and what could act as a better show of proof that you will do right by your customers, too? The metrics don’t lie – take a look at our top employee advocacy statistics if you need a little extra convincing.
It should come as no surprise that getting employees on board isn’t as simple as sending out an office memo or making a one-off announcement in a company meeting. That high ROI is reserved for businesses that can really motivate their employees in the same way you need to motivate customers toward loyalty.
Here’s how to get your employees using social media for advocacy on your behalf.
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Make Social Media Advocacy Manageable
An employee advocacy program could easily swallow up your team’s workforce. It’s very easy for a motivated team to launch into an advocacy program with every ounce of time and energy, only to burn out – or realize that other parts of the job have suffered. The key is to harness that motivation and interest with the right tools.
In other words, you need the right employee advocate platform – something that centralizes your efforts, and makes all the right resources available to anyone who has opted into the program.
The key to effective employee advocacy is longevity. No strong social media marketing campaign can focus exclusively on the short-term; it’s all about consistently working toward long-term goals for driving engagement, clicks, and conversions. The exact same is true for driving advocacy on social media.
Don’t make it the primary focus for a week before forgetting about it for another ten. Utilize your employee advocacy platform for storing and repurposing content, tracking progress (more on that below), and identifying opportunities to boost your social media ROI through the right real-time monitoring and listening strategy.
Nothing will prove sustainable in the long term if it’s handled like a once-and-done task. Start as you mean to go on, and build your employee advocacy program into your social media strategy – treat it as a core element rather than an (optional) appendage.
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Make it Motivating
Motivation is at the very heart of advocacy on social media. This is something we alluded to way back at the beginning of the article – the fact that social proof stems (in part) from the motivation that people feel to go out of their way to shout about the value of a business – whether they’re a customer or an employee.
But how do you motivate your employees? Once again, it’s not a one-and-done thing – you’ve got to commit to continually shouting about the value their efforts bring to the business. For that, you’ll want to be able to lead with a handful of illustrative KPIs – some stats that really measure the impact they’re having on your social media ROI. Don’t just stop at the head of the funnel – follow those new leads (the ones generated by your employee advocates) all the way through, so they can really witness the impact they’re having.
No one performs best in a vacuum. The most effective way to motivate any team in any business is to make sure they’re always aware of the way their hard work impacts the rest of the business rather than one small part of it.
- Make it Make Sense
What are you asking of your employees? Are you asking them to navigate these waters themselves (bad idea), or are you asking them to utilize a more nuanced strategy? A lot of the time, a lack of interest and motivation stems from them simply not understanding what’s expected of them. Why spend time on something with no definitive start- or endpoint?
Great employee advocacy depends on great content, but what does ‘great content’ mean? Remember that you don’t just want to turn your marketing team into advocates – ideally, you want a cross-section of the entire business to buy into the program, and their day-to-day roles don’t require a keen understanding of social posting or content creation.
Employees can be reluctant to buy into the idea of employee advocacy for fear of doing it wrong. Marketing teams are used to representing the business in public spaces like social media, but others aren’t.
The solution? Use your advocate platform to store a strong supply of pre-approved content for your advocates to post whenever they want. These employee boards can spell the difference between high uptake and widespread disinterest. With the right framework that outlines the social media best practices for employees, there’s no risk that they’ll do something wrong or misstep, which should help both of you to feel more positive about advocacy.
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Make it Rewarding
It’s no secret that our advocacy is extremely valuable; any employee will know that, by leveraging their own social presence as an additional means for boosting your business’s digital presence and attracting new leads, they’re offering up some valuable real estate.
It’s not cynical to start wondering where the pro quo is in employee advocacy – the extra incentive that stands as recognition of the extra legwork they’re putting in for the business. That’s why plenty of brands will incentivize advocacy – because boosting uptake is the key to getting the highest ROI from the program.
It doesn’t take much, either. Good, old-fashioned recognition goes a very long way to motivating employees. Don’t let the value of what they’re doing fall by the wayside; the day you do is the day things start to fizzle out.
There are other ways to incentivize employees, from financial bonuses to other perks for putting that extra legwork into the business.
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Make it a Part of the Culture
We’ve touched on this already in this article, but it deserves its own section, nonetheless.
Why? Well, for starters, employee advocates are the most valuable employees any business could have. What’s better than a business fuelled by team members who really believe in the value of what you’re doing – who are proud to be employees of your business and to shout about that on social media? The more you can make your advocates a central part of the business’s culture, the more productive and positive your culture will become.
And it works the other way, too. If advocacy starts to feel like part-and-parcel of working for your business, then it’s only natural that more of your employees will become advocates themselves. It’s all about normalizing it without allowing it to become a routine chore or letting its true value be understated.
Utilizing the Right Advocate Marketing Platform
This is the biggest piece of the puzzle: a tool purpose-built to centralize and clarify your strategy for employee advocacy.
One of the biggest causes of employee advocacy schemes fizzling out is a lack of structure. While you may start with the best of intentions, any friction or confusion employees feel when they’re trying to get involved will chip away at their resolve and leave them uninspired to take part.
Oktopost is designed to empower employees to take part. It makes all content available in one place, allows you to implement a clear framework for approval and compliance, offers users the tools they need to repurpose and re-write content quickly, and in a way that remains in-keeping with brand voice and any industry standards. It’s there to give your employee advocacy strategy wings and enable you to realize the full potential this endeavor holds for businesses with the smarts to adopt it.
