Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Why Employee Advocacy Is So Important For 2016
During 2015, many companies had started to realise the importance of having employee advocates and how powerful they could be, especially when they amplified a positive message using social media. Savvy companies stopped banning social media. Instead, they gave their employees valuable training on how to use it effectively and responsibly. Companies finally woke up to the fact that an unproductive employee was just that, an unproductive employee and it wasn’t social media after all, in fact, they realised that social media could make the whole company much more productive.
These companies looked at their company culture, their employer brand and the social flow within their organisation, all of this had to be right for employee advocacy to work. The same applies to any company embarking on an employee advocacy programme; the four pillars have to be there:
- Company Culture
- Employer Brand
- Social Flow
- Social Media Training
= employee advocacy
It’s more important than ever now that companies work on those four parts and get an employee advocacy programme in place, this is why:
It’s going to get harder to be seen organically
Everyone moaned when reach on Facebook seriously diminished and businesses had to start dipping into their pockets to pay to be seen. The same thing is happening on Twitter; there will a time soon when businesses will have to start paying to be in the feeds of their followers. It will become the norm for social networks to charge businesses to be seen, the small business or the start-up will have to compete with the big business, the winner will be who chucks the most money at it, unless... you empower your employees.
How many employees do you have? How many networks do they have? How many connections in each network do they have?
When you have the four pillars in place, you can then help your employees to become ninja advocates by giving them great content to share, helping them share ideas between each other using tools like slack, trello or Hibox and rewarding them for engaging posts.
Your employees are your knights on white horses, galloping past the competition to get the company message out to the people who matter, your customers.
- When content is shared by employees, it receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today)
- Messages reached 561% further when shared by employees versus the same messages shared via official brand social channels (Source: MSLGroup)
- Messages are re-shared 24x more frequently when distributed by employees than messages re-shared by brand channels (Source: MSLGroup)
It’s time to get serious about employee advocacy, get a programme in place now before I say “I told you so.”
JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.
Julie Bishop Jobhop
In:
- Social media