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The buzz word lately when it comes to employee engagement in social media is “employee advocacy.” The term employee advocacy is fairly self-explanatory, turning members of your team into advocates for your company and brand. The importance of formal employee advocacy programs on brands looking to capitalize on social media cannot be understated. Your potential clients are on social media, passively consuming content daily. Your employees have established/trusting networks of people who are interested in their posts. Combine these two truths and you have a perfect channel to distribute your brand’s message to an ideal audience.
An often overlooked benefit of employee advocacy however is it’s potential to get employees engaged and buy in to their firm’s message more. By encouraging your employees to share, you’re creating an open dialogue between not only your employees and their connections but your employees and your firm.
Sharing/communication is everything in today’s digital world and in the eyes of an innovative marketer, an easy way to build awareness online and amongst your employees.
As you are likely aware, disengaged employees are always a threat to any organization. So, start encouraging and empowering both engaged and disengaged employees to become social savvy using employee advocacy tool. Here are some quick hits and stats that help show the power of employee advocacy from Maximizesocialbusiness.com:
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84% of consumers’ value recommendations from friends and family above all forms of advertising – and additionally, 77% of consumers are likely to make a purchase after hearing about it from someone they trust (Source: Nielsen).
Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by employees’ vs the brand (Source: MSLGroup).
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Leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7x more frequently than other leads
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Employees of socially engaged companies are more likely to stay at their company, feel optimistic about their company’s future and believe their company is more competitive (Source: Altimeter & LinkedIn Relationship Economics 2014).
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98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company (Source: Weber Shandwick).
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Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today).
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Customers referred by advocates have a 37% higher retention rate (Source: Deloitte).
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Nearly 31% of high-growth firms have a formal employee advocacy program, more than double the average of all other firms. Almost 86% of advocates in a formal program said that their involvement in social media had a positive impact on their career (Source: Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today).
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Referrals are one of the top sources of external hires, according to CareerXRoads, and employee advocates are perfect referrers. A recruitment campaign driven entirely by advocacy can have an on-cost that’s close to zero (Source: Social Media Today).
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60 million American employees share positive comments about their workplace online (Source: Ad Age).
This post was written by Alex Riesz, Sales Development Rep at ClearView Social and Adrian Dayton, Founder of ClearView Social, the #1 social sharing platform for large and medium-sized legal, accounting and recruiting firms. Learn more athttps://clearviewsocial.com