Employee Advocacy: Definition, Importance, and Benefits

Employee advocacy is an important part of any company’s employee branding strategy.Employee advocacy is an important part of any company’s employee branding  and social media strategy. As an employer, one of the best ways to spread the word about your products and services is to get your employees to talk about them, all of which increases positive brand awareness online. Not surprisingly, consumers are more likely to trust friends than corporations. Both the company and the consumer benefit from putting trust into the hands of employees.

A recommendation from a trusted contact carries more authenticity, and thus more credibility. Employee Advocacy is a way for employees to share their enthusiasm for the brand with their peers, helping them to become brand ambassadors online. It creates awareness organically, in a way that consumers can embrace and trust the brand.

What is the Most Important Aspect of an Employee Advocate?

Authenticity is what matters most. Authenticity doesn’t mean that the employee insights are completely separate from the company. Indeed, the company can help employees by giving them the resources they need to create, publish, and share content.

An effective employee advocacy program will give employees the social media management tools they need to share useful elements, like pictures of the month or feature articles, that they can then incorporate into their own social media posts. This can include an integrated platform that allows native sharing, as well as a media library of pre-approved photos, videos, and images that are ready to be shared.

What are the Benefits of an Employee Advocacy Program?

Thanks to the internet and social media, the way we receive, process, and share information has changed drastically. This may seem like a high-tech adaptation, but in some ways it’s actually more like the way news and gossip was once spread through towns and villages by word of mouth.

The primary difference being that today, that “word of mouth” is digital, taking place across social media platforms, email, and chat groups at a drastically accelerated pace. As members of these new online communities, employees have the potential to be powerful advocates. And when that power is properly harnessed, the positive effects of employee advocacy can be impressive. 

A few statistics showing the benefits of an employee advocacy program

• 60% of consumers consult blog articles, videos, or publications on social media about a product before making a purchase. (blog.hubspot.fr) 
• 4 consumers in 5 buy products based on a recommendation. (blog.hubspot.fr) 
• Your employees are connected to 10x more people than your brand. Which means when they share content, brand awareness sky-rockets. (socialreport.com) 
• 33% of customers trust brands, while 90% of customers trust recommendations from people they know. It’s true—employees make the best brand ambassadors. It only makes sense to channel their enthusiasm for the brand. (socialreport.com) 
• Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels. That means 8x as many likes, shares, and comments. (legibra.com) 
• Just 1 person who shares your message can result in more click-through activity than if your company adds 100 followers. There’s a tremendous amount of potential in every single employee. (writetarget.com) 
• 60 employees can increase your company’s reach by 1,000%. All it takes is a good communications strategy, the right platform, and a little employee engagement. (writetarget.com) 

79% of firms reported more online visibility once implementing a formal employee advocacy program. These employee advocacy facts speak for themselves—an employee advocacy program is an extremely powerful tool! (b2b-assests.glassdoor.com)

Find the Best Employee Advocacy Platform

Now, we know. Which begs the question: What is the best employee advocacy platform for you? 

Centralizing and consolidating your company’s social media channels into a single hub can take what was a disconnected jumble of information, and integrate it into a single coherent stream. In creating an aggregated platform, employees get instant access to all of your social media posts. And if your hub can also integrate existing newsletters and intranets, even better.

Essentially, you want to make it as easy and convenient as possible for employees to absorb and share company information. Remember, for employees to engage with their company’s brand in an authentic, organic way, your presence on their social media feeds needs to feel authentic and organic.

Here are some other things to look for in the best employee advocacy programs, and in employee advocacy software in general:

Gamification with Meaningful Rewards 

This can add a real boost when it comes to engagement and the production of user generated content. Make sure your platform offers polls, quizzes, and rewards as a means of encouraging employees to speak their mind and get involved. This will jumpstart engagement early in the program.

And rewards are more effective if they have actual meaning or CSR impact. Employees want to make a difference, and a reward that improves the lives of others or helps the planet will accomplish far more than a gift certificate or trophy (i.e. our Sociabble Trees program). 

Data and KPI Measurement for Employee Advocacy Goals 

Measurement is important. In order to know if your employee advocacy program is working, it’s essential that your platform has the capability to track data. Ideally via a leaderboard, on things like the number of shares, likes, and user generated content created. 

With the Sociabble platform, for example, users have access to the following capabilities:

• Ability to slice data to understand behaviors through departments and profiles in the organization, including usage on mobile vs. desktop, etc.
• Understand when people are the most likely to share content
• See what type of content resonates the most with every profile in the company
• Identify who are the best ambassadors, most engaged or the most influential
• Separate the part of the traffic on company assets generated by the EA program
• See leads generated
• Identify ongoing deals that are influenced by the EA program

Newsletter Feature 

The ability to send out automated newsletters to share company news can be a big plus. If it comes with attractive templates, even better. Because newsletters are still a powerful employee advocacy tool, they just have to be adapted to the digital age. And targeting features can enhance newsletters even further.

Third-Party Content Curation 

Automatic content curation is another feature that the best platforms will provide. Third-party content is important because it boosts engagement, and it gives employees the information they need to become thought leaders themselves. A good content mix simply keeps things interesting, too. 

The platform should provide a simple employee advocacy tool that employees can use to manage their social media and publish their content. If it is too complicated or expensive, then social media publishing will remain in the hands of just a few trained social media managers, when what you want is to provide a tool that all employees can use

And it helps if employees are supported by being supplied with photos and suggested hashtags they can incorporate into their social media posts, a library that includes pictures of the month, recent publications, or PR mentions of the company.

Since prefilling of posts from employee advocacy platforms is increasingly being eliminated by social media networks, this approach is more important than ever. It helps ensure that posts are fully-formed, but also authentic. 

An Employee Advocacy Mobile App is Key.

An employee advocacy platform is fine, but an employee advocacy app is even better. 

Perhaps the most important factor in forming your employee advocacy strategy and selecting a platform is mobile capability. The fact is, mobile devices are the conduit most often used by employees to engage with their social media apps. True, they will still use desktops to a degree.

But now more than ever, an employee advocacy app is crucial when it comes to employee advocacy for social media. Your platform needs to be easy to use, visually appealing, and intuitive as a communications tool. If it’s clunky to use, then employees simply will not engage. Give them a sleek, intuitive, mobile alternative. 

Perhaps the most important factor in forming your employee advocacy strategy and selecting a platform is mobile capability.

Launch an Employee Advocacy Strategy Pilot Using Social Media.

In this paragraph, you’ll discover how to launch a successful employee advocacy program. 

Before going full-on, a pilot is often a good idea, if it’s done at the proper scale and with the right resources. This will help you work out the bugs and find solutions before the full roll-out. When launching an advocacy program, the people you select for a pilot can have a defining impact on the success of the initiative.

But how you choose your pilot participants also depends on the ultimate objectives of your advocacy program. Whether your priority is to drive adoption among a specific department, or to pave the way for a global deployment, here are the best ways to define who should be involved in your advocacy pilot. 

Look to Your Existing Employee Ambassadors

A good place to start when selecting participants is with those who already advocate for you on social media. Those who engage with company content on a regular basis. Including those who are already connected with clients online, or who share their own work-related content. This may include photos taken at company events, for example.

By doing this you bet on the people who are most likely to engage on an employee advocacy platform. They also set the tone for others and even play a leadership role in subsequent training and onboarding initiatives. 

But be aware: the best ambassadors are not necessarily the ones with the most existing followers or best online personal brand. They’re often simply the ones who are most engaged with company life, and the most excited to share that enthusiasm online.

Organizational Roles 

When launching an employee advocacy initiative one thing needs to be decided before anything else. Who will steer the project? Whatever your company’s advocacy engagement strategy is, assigning organizational roles is necessary in order to streamline communication.

Similarly, they need to balance task management and ensure the longevity of the advocacy initiative. Having organization in place from the get-go allows for a clear vision and a successful program, one that becomes part of the overall company culture.

Employee Training 

You need to address certain questions when implementing an employee advocacy initiative. What are the ground rules for communication? What type of content and/or language should we avoid? How will any bad buzz be managed? How do employees know what they can and cannot share? 

Covering questions such as these, as well as others, can be done in training sessions. An effective EA platform should provide solutions and materials to help train your workforce.

Sociabble, for example, comes with the ability to create surveys, quizzes, and seminars built around pre-packaged training courses, not to mention the option of expert in-person consulting.

Incorporate Employee Advocacy into Employee Communication.

A successful employee advocacy program has benefits that extend beyond simply increased brand awareness and brand advocacy. It can easily dovetail into larger, more expansive employee communications initiatives. 

And it relies, in fact, on strong employee engagement and well-informed employees, both of which are crucial to effective company communication in general

With this in mind, consider the big picture. You are improving the way employees share information. You’re also encouraging the creation of content and employee feedback. Don’t be afraid to think of your social media advocacy initiative as a crucial part of your company’s larger internal communication and employee communication programs. Communications should be integrated. There’s no reason to compartmentalize one arena of communication within your office when it comes to your employee advocacy efforts.

And when choosing a platform, find a solution that can handle both. Your employee advocacy tools can usually do more than you think. And companies that use employee advocacy can often do more with it than they realize. Understanding the employee advocacy definition and putting it into practice will open new doors.

Conclusion: An Employee Advocacy Plan is Definitely Worth It.

The results from a well-planned social media advocacy program won’t come overnight. It will take some time to plan and to educate employees. To launch and to yield results. After all, you’re not just changing your strategy. 

You’re going to be changing the way employees think and share regarding their company, as well as the company culture itself. But results will come, in both tangible and intangible forms. Patience, planning, and dedication make the difference. They will help you unlock the full power of employee advocacy. 

If you’re looking for a specific platform to launch your own employee advocacy initiative, Sociabble offers a full-service employee advocacy platform, complete with total social media integration and CSM support.

It allows you to aggregate both company and employee-generated content, organize it into interest-based channels, and make it shareable on virtually any social media outlet with a single click. It helps employees enhance their digital footprint, while simultaneously giving companies more external visibility and awareness.

Don’t wait, schedule your demo now and let our experts share with you the power of a well-structured employee advocacy plan.