The following is a sponsored article from our partner, GaggleAMP
A common excuse to pursue an employee advocacy strategy is that people don’t think their employees want to be part of an employee advocacy program, but that’s just not the case.
In fact, you have more employee advocates than you think. Many people in your organization are already mentioning your brand or sharing your branded content on social media, so they’re willing to promote your brand and be advocates for you. According to the Marketing Advisory Network, 47% of Baby Boomers share information about their job on social media, compared to 72% of Gen Xers and 81% of Millenials.
There is a large percentage of people in each generation that share about work on social media, and keep in mind that Millenials make up most of the workforce today. These are the people you should focus on when building your employee advocacy program.
Guide Your Employees to Advocacy
Because you have people who are willing to promote your brand on social media, it only makes sense to leverage them and help them promote the right initiatives the right way.
If they’re already talking about their work and your brand on social media, then they’ll be happy to promote at least some of the initiatives that your marketing department says will benefit the brand. You just need to guide them by letting them know what those initiatives are and how you want them to promote them.
Given the information you have about how many people in your office are active on social media, the decision to implement an employee advocacy program should be a no brainer.
The Benefits of Employee Advocacy
An employee advocacy program will help your marketing department, and other departments at your organization, in many ways.
First, simply having more accounts on social media promoting your initiatives and messaging will further your digital presence and your social media reach. This is incredibly important to increase brand recognition.
There are people who follow your employees who don’t follow your brand. Your employees also have secondary connections that don’t follow your brand or your employees but will see your message when people engage with your employees’ posts. This is why messages shared by employees reach over 5X further than the same messages shared by your brand, according to the MSL Group.
Second, people trust your employees more than they trust your brand or even your CEO. This should come as no surprise as people trust other people more than they trust advertisements or brand accounts, which can be viewed with the same skepticism that an ad does.
Because people trust your brand employees more than your brand, your message is more likely to resonate with people when they see it coming from an employee’s account rather than a brand’s account. This is why messages get 24X more engagement when shared by your employees than when shared by your brand account, according to the MSLGroup.
Third, employee advocacy helps departments outside of your marketing team. For example, you can use employee advocacy in Sales departments to help with social selling, and it helps your Human Resources team with recruiting talent similar to their present employee base.
This goes back to the point about people trusting other people more than they trust brand accounts, and how people view posts from brands the same way they view an advertisement. According to a survey by the Marketing Advisory Network, 44.5% of people say they are more likely to apply for a job they saw a friend post on social media than the same job if they saw on a job board.
These are just some of the benefits from employee advocacy, so it’s clear you could have a clear advantage over competitors if you implement one in your organization.
It’s Easy to Guide Your Employees
In order to let employees know what they should promote on their social media accounts, you just need to enroll them into your employee advocacy program. Once you do that, it takes seconds for them to receive a notification and react without bothering them.
With an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP, you’ll have integrations with many popular business applications. This means that when employees receive a notification requesting them to perform an action on social media, they’ll see the notification in an app they’re already working in. This makes the process seamless by not interrupting your employees’ workflow. They don’t have to close out of a window they’re working in to respond to an action. Instead, they can see the notification, respond to the action and continue with their work in less than five seconds.
Employee advocacy is a great differentiator between you and your competitors. It doesn’t matter what size your organization is, what industry it’s in, or how many employees you have active on social media. You can leverage the ones who are to help promote your brand.
