In today’s social media marketing scenario, there are two assumptions that we can safely make:
1) Globally, social media is the largest medium connecting brands and their target audiences
(Based on studies that show the number of social media users at 2.4 billion, over 1/3rd of the world’s population at around 7 billion)
2) To reach out to larger segments of our target audiences, we need to amplify our messages
(Based on reports of content shared on Facebook each day, at 4 billion pieces of content)
This is great news for marketers. Instead of focusing on the competition for space and attention, we could focus on how social media traffic is driving us to employ inventive methods to reach out to our audiences, like employee advocacy.
The three-way win that is employee advocacy
The definition of employee advocacy – developing a system that encourages employees to share company-approved content on social media while grooming them to become spokespersons for your brand.
Employee advocacy positively impacts three relationships – the employer-employee relationship, the employee-employee relationship, and the employee-potential/current customer relationship. If implemented the right way, employee advocacy can boost your branding and sales while also revitalizing your work culture.
5 Employee Advocacy Platforms That Present Unique Advantages
At present, the market has a multitude of options in terms of employee advocacy platforms that you can use to manage organization-wide employee advocacy programs. Let’s explore a few of them so you can gauge the features available and understand what to look for when choosing a platform for your organization.
Circulate.It
This platform simply draws on an already existing work-convention to implement employee advocacy – the company-wide newsletter. Even if you don’t intend to have employees active on social media, you could use this platform to keep them updated on the goings-on in your organization, in your industry and better equip them with knowledge to make great decisions at work.
Circulate.It allows the admin account to create and send bulk-email to all registered users in a particular company account. The recipients of the email can share any of the particulars of the email directly to their social media accounts using the social go-to icons on the email. Simplified communication and implementation of employee advocacy.
DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform
Of the best features of this platform, is the ease with which admin can source, upload and manage content. Invited employees have access to a company company content stream that the admin can populate with strategic content (both promotional content created by the company’s marketing teams, and industry news-related recommendations sourced from the platform).
Employees can schedule content right from the stream to their social accounts. The scheduling feature allows extra control in reaching your company’s target audience. To motivate employees to participate, the platform has an in-built leaderboard that runs on the laws gamification, allowing you to identify and reward top participants. Finally, the platform provides in-depth analytics per employee and per post so you can track the progress of your program.
Kredible
One of the risks in involving employees on social media is online credibility management. By using employees as spokespeople, they become representatives of your brand, and hence an extension of it. Their appearance and demeanor on social affect how your company is seen.
Kredible scans LinkedIn profiles of all accounts connected to it, and provides an online credibility score and suggestions of what to fix in order to increase that score. Based on the suggestions, your company, and your employees can optimize your LinkedIn profiles to improve audience perceptions of your brand. In addition to this unique feature Kredible also suggests content based on audience interests for your employees to share on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Elevate
LinkedIn Elevate is the best seamless addition to a B2B company’s LinkedIn marketing efforts. If your company generates most of its leads on LinkedIn, there’s no better employee advocacy tool to use.
You could implement the entire cycle, from publishing content on LinkedIn’s Pulse, to commenting on LinkedIn groups, and directly reaching out to your target audience on LinkedIn via your sales team, and amplify your presence by having your content shared by all of your employees on the platform. By integrating your LinkedIn marketing and employee advocacy efforts, you can access in-depth insights on how exactly your employee advocacy program has impacted page views and activity on your LinkedIn page.
Everyone Social
Everyone social is aimed at increasing employee usage of employee advocacy platforms by constantly improving their user interface based on employee usage patterns. Considering that most employees aren’t keen on adding to their workload or adapting to new technology and behaviors, this employee advocacy application focuses its efforts on improving employee participation to push on possible reach and impact of the posts your share via employee advocacy.
In attempt to increase employee usage, the platform also focuses on its mobile solutions, android and IoS, to encourage employees who are more comfortable sharing from their mobile phones rather than their desktops.
5 straight-out benefits of employee advocacy and the insights they provide
1. The undeniable increase in sales
Connecting key employees directly to current and fence-sitting customers is even better for conversions and retention than we would have originally thought.
According to this study conducted by sales expert Jim Keenan’s firm, 78% of sales personnel connected to their audience on social media outsell their peers.
The significance of this study is echoed by real marketers in the world – Daniel Skaritka, marketing coordinator of a fairly large business says they intentionally engage their sales team on LinkedIn and have seen actual business coming out of it.
2. The instant and controlled, increased reach
By implementing employee advocacy, you’re essentially generating word of mouth, and with control over what is being said.
Any message that you have carefully crafted by your marketing/creative team can be amplified up to 100 times the amplification you get via your brand’s social media pages, by inviting your work-force to get involved.
3. The ability to build a brand with ease
Traditionally, it takes months or years of extra-ordinary effort to build an untouchable brand. With your employee advocates, you can dramatically speed-up the process.
As we have discussed, you can seen as much as 100X times the reach with comparatively much lower advertising value as you might have to spend on television or radio.
4. The added advantage of increased credibility
You’re instantly acquiring what otherwise takes years to build. Credibility is precious in a world where people can switch loyalties with a touch of a finger. According to Edelman’s trust barometer, friends and family continue to rank above other sources of information available on the internet.
You are likely to make a much better headway on building trust by delivering your message via your employees, than you are by dispelling it through your brand’s social media accounts.
4. The incredible benefit of increased conversations
Employee advocacy also directly impacts your lead conversions. According to this study run by IBM, leads generated as a result of employee advocacy are 7 times as likely to convert as leads developed otherwise.
Not only does employee advocacy increase lead conversions, but it also shortens your sales cycle and reduced money lost in nurturing non-convert leads in the process.
5. The most sought-after benefit of better recruitment
Companies can improve their revenues by a significant amount if they don’t lose money to inefficient recruiting. Employee advocacy is an interesting fix to that problem.
Even without the label of employee advocacy companies across the world are recruiting through their employees’ networks. Using an employee advocacy platform to share recruitment ad content is simply a more organized and effective way of doing it.
That wraps up a brief exploration of five employee advocacy platforms and insights. How you apply it to your particular situation and accelerate your social media marketing and recruitment results is now in your hands.
