With everyone on social, publishing millions of pieces of content per minute, making your mark can be tough. How do you break through the clutter with freshly baked content?
Frankly speaking, if you are not using your employees to advocate your brand it’s like owning a Ferrari and not being able to drive over 40 mph.
To summarize, employee advocacy is about turning your employees into brand advocates on social and leveraging their social connections to crank up your social reach exponentially.
Of course there is more to employee advocacy than meets the eye. Deep-dive further in to Employee Advocacy here at –
Once you have realized the true potential of your task force, regardless of whether you are a start-up or a well-established big-wig, setting up an employee advocacy program can a amplify your brands presence big time.
So let’s begin with steps to shape up an employee advocacy program.
1. Chalk out where you’re heading with it.
Have a clear idea as to where you want to end up with your employee advocacy mission. It may be an overused piece of advice, but for a good reason.
What do you desire to achieve with the employee advocacy program? A few common objectives are:
• Extending social reach.
• Driving brand awareness.
• To create thought leaders through knowledge sharing.
• To build a deeper connection between employees and customers other than brand and customers.
Only when you answer the Why of getting an employee advocacy program will you be able to figure how to reach there. This will set the foundation to determine your short-term goals, KPIs, social channels, etc. to achieve your end goal.
2. Make employees love both their job and their company.
Your employees need to be talking about the brand/company, but they will only talk about it genuinely if the subject matter interests them. So, what tends to get the employees excited? If you deconstruct it, you’d come to discover that it boils down to the culture.
Think beyond once-a-year off-site events for the employees. Create more opportunities for employees to be social which could be through organizing sports and hobby-based activities.
When you build on work culture, employees will not just share company stuff but will feel a sense of pride in sharing it.
3. Lay down some ground rules
It’s common for top decision makers to be hesitant while involving employees in branding and marketing, lest it lead to unpleasant proceedings.
While it’s also advised to give the employees the freedom to express, you can ensure that the brand’s messages are communicated properly by establishing some basic guidelines of how they should refer to the products and services online.
Set guidelines around polite online behavior such as avoiding abusive language at all costs.
4. Add a human touch
Have you ever given a thought to the fact that a random individual status update at times gets more likes than a well thought out brand copy you came up with?
The “personal connection” goes a long way because people get tipped off the moment they see brand-generated content as they subconsciously perceive it as “promotional”.
5. We are in the social media age, so act like it
It’s imperative that all the employees are on the same page to reap better benefits. Not every employee is a social media genius. Bring them up to speed with social media practices from formal social media training.
6. Pay close attention to the numbers
To create an effective employee advocacy program, you need to measure and communicate tangible results of your initiatives. Devise a plan of what social media metrics you will want to track. These metrics will also align with your company’s primary business goals.
Keep in mind that tracking KPIs for employee advocacy is necessary to maintain long-term growth of the program.
7. Observe – Tweak – Optimize – Repeat
Change is the law of nature. Let’s respect the fact that employee advocacy is relatively new and is still going through evolution. Anticipate the constant need to refine your program as you explore more about the employees, their behaviour, your marketplace and technology used to amplify the outcome.
Be willing to listen, learn and adjust so that your employee advocacy program is continuously working for your organization – rather than for your competition.
8. Choose the right platform to manage your program
Employee advocacy is easier said than done. The toughest part is often the execution.
Setting metrics that align with KPIs, moderating, and overall management is no cake walk. That’s why an employee advocacy tool is highly recommended.
SocioAdvocacy is a smart employee advocacy tool designed to make employee advocacy programs easily manageable so that it can save your time while you focus on your other marketing duties.
A few features that the tool includes are listed below:
• Real-time reporting
• Cross-platform access
• Content curation
• One click sharing
• Employee rewarding leaderboards
• Gamification
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, developing and achieving results won’t happen overnight. But if you follow the above steps with some perseverance, you’ll have a task force making use of their full potential in no time.
